Mama

Mama

 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

beautiful girl

outstanding student

studies interrupted by war.

 

chose love over all others

crossed seas

settled in land of promise

gentleman-farmer’s wife

life’s battler.

 

english high school teacher

bookkeeper

mother of eight

lost two sons who died for the country.

 

gardener and fruit tree grower

suffered a mild stroke

recovered

loving grandmother.

 

ageing gracefully

gathers wildflowers

still loves and quotes shakespeare

loves and quotes the bible more

heart of that family.

 happy birthday.

From Nick Joaquin’s Almanac for Manileños

Establishment of a normal school for teachers in Manila: 1865.

Inauguration of the first Philippine Republic in Malolos: 1899 

 

a letter opener from another friend

Hanunoo Mangyan Ambahan

 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

 

In the early days of the internet, in the early 90s, I became friends with those who had personal web pages. I had one myself. Now vanished in that particular presentation.

One of them, a lover of islands and an island person like myself, made me a gift or pasalubong, a homecoming gift, sent by mail after a holiday on his island.

It is a letter opener from a Mangyan Center. Incised into the bamboo body is a verse to friendship in the Mangyan syllabic script.

From Filipino Heritage Volume 2, page 566:

What sets the Southern Mindoro Mangyan really apart from the other groups on the island, however, is the daily use of their indispensable writing system.Centuries ago they must have acquired this art of writing, and no outside influence could take the tradition away. There are no formal teachers but the children can be seen eagerly copying the incised characters from the bamboo containers of their parents, relatives or older friends. With bamboo for paper and the sharp point of a small knife as pen, the young pupils practise the angular symbols, memorizing them. Nobody obliges them. It can generally be said that if a Mangyan knows the script, he must be a person with initiative and interested in undertaking something. Moreover, knowledge of the writing system sharpens greatly memory and intelligence.The existence of this syllabic script among these Mangyan has certainly helped them retain their traditional folklore literature which is expressed in poems, chants, folk tales and riddles. Over and over again, these are written down on bamboo and copied by the following generation.

two cards from a friend

two cards from a friend

Originally uploaded by anetz.

It is 2008. At the start of the year I thought of all the friends I have made.From the time I was a little girl called dagsa or driftwood because we were not originally from that barrio.

I learned to fit in by speaking the dialect which was different from the one I spoke at home with family. Most of my classmates could not afford any kind of footwear, so I hid shoes or wooden clogs in the bushes along the roadside while walking to school.

Whenever we had to speak English in school, I made sure that I sounded just like my classmates. Whenever I had to speak it in my mother’s presence, I had to speak it the way she taught us to speak it, in her English teacher’s way.

Later, many of my friends were penfriends. I was always reaching out to the farthest points of the globe it seemed. The written word fascinated me. So did captured images, photographs. My grandfather encouraged me. We searched the pen pal section of the Philippine Free Press for likely candidates for my pre-pubescent yearnings.

These cards are from a friend who was a well known photographer. She took photographs of people she admired, as a passion, apart from the photographs she took for a living. These people were mainly writers.

So there was this confluence of photography and words again.

We were not to meet. She lives in my memory now that she no longer lives to photograph her beloved Paris.

She also lives on in the letters and cards she wrote me. And these will live on after I am gone in the archives of a university library.

I still have friends whose lines of love are cast over the seas and through space. I do likewise.

It is still possible to have beautiful, sustaining friendships in this troubled world.

Often I see film clips of devastated areas- bombings, civil wars, droughts, natural disasters in the evening news on television. Many are made to sound as if they were the nest of nothing else but terrorists and the most impoverished with unenlightened leaders.

But I know otherwise. I have friends there.

On a one to one basis that friendship is, a country becomes better known.

There is always a heart.

There is always a soul.

Aliwagwag Falls

Untamed beauty

Originally uploaded by anetz.

All those years growing up in Cateel, all those holidays from university and work, this was a name that for me conjured unseen beauty and mystery.

It was said to be accessible only by motorboat if the occupants were willing to disembark to drag it over slippery boulders. This was to be done for a series of thirteen rapids. I don’t know if this was true.

We have a propensity to choose those magical numbers: siete, trece … seven, thirteen. Old carpenters and home builders used to recite oro, plata, mata to determine the number of steps in the main stairs leading to our salas. To make it end on  oro – gold. Always. For good luck.

There were no photographs. The lenses of cameras fogged up in the vicinity of the falls especially in the afternoon.

Then the bridge was built. Aliwagwag Falls became accessible.

The rainforest around it also became accessible to illegal loggers. One overloaded truck caused the bridge to collapse and that killed several people.

The load? Logs.

It is no longer too misty to take photographs, even in the late afternoon when a light drizzle falls.

When I took this photograph, a thought came unbidden: are there no longer enough trees in the surrounding rainforest? The fog did not obscure my camera lens. Or was that fine day just my buenas, my suerte? My good luck.

January 19

Banning by royal decree, of the Masonic Order in the Philippines: 1812. 

Third Sunday of the month which this year falls on the 20th is Holy Name Sunday, the fiesta of Tondo, Pandacan, Cebu City and other shrines of the Santo Niño. 

 

from Nick Joaquin’s Almanac for Manileños 

 

kurob

kurob 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

This was the kurob of my childhood. In the cycle of amihan, rice planting and rice harvesting, it was the prelude to the third stage, harvesting. When we went to the kurob, the rice was ripening and notice had been given to the pivotal persons in the barrio grapevine that the Reynes ricefield would soon be ready. It was a makeshift affair, usually quickly constructed from wood, bamboo and nipa by my father and another man, sometimes two men. After the harvest it was usually dismantled and the nipa thatching kept in storage with other materials for the main house’s maintenance.

For us children, it was an annual pilgrimage which smacked of a grand adventure. My parents would pile us up on the kangga which was like a big sled built from bamboo and hardwood, pulled by a water buffalo or carabao. Before this it had been different pots and pans, a half barrel and several kerosene cans of drinking and cooking water, food supplies, clothes and a small number of reading material.

A ritual that went with the harvest season like an opening ceremony was making pinipig. Rice which was not quite ready for harvest yet, still with a minute quantity of the milky juice that made it soft, not quite brown but greenish was harvested then dry roasted. It was then pounded to the quick rhythm of the harvesters’ strong tempo. When they finished and the grains were separated from the husks, the product was fragrant, flat-grained rice pinipig. This was mixed with sugar and milk and again pounded in the meticulously cleaned wooden lusong. Then the final product was moulded into attractive shapes on fire-softened young banana leaves. That is if the waiting children could be held off for such matters of aesthetics! It kept very well.

We learned special things during our stay there. For example, I learned to be ready for the owl’s sudden screech and powerful swish of wings early mornings in the ricefield and not to be startled witless by them. It always seemed like it waited until I was just three feet or so away before it took flight. That heavy dew sparkled like fat diamonds on the leaves of weeds between paddies, fat and wet enough to wet one’s feet and legs. That the orchids with the dove-shaped white flowers hanging along the banks of the Tagada-o River had such a powerful fragrance that if you inhaled it for a long time, it would make you sneeze. That if you left footprints in the gray mud along the river banks and it was low tide the following day, then you would most likely find small fishes in your footprints where water remained until the next high tide. That it was easy to capture the fish in your scooped hands, take them home in a can of river water but they did not survive on the diet of rice, although mudfish sometimes did. The same with trying to steal and foster the downy gray chicks of the long legged tugtug, newly hatched from their brown flecked eggs- they died or if they survived early days, then the family cat which also made the move to the kurob as an essential member because it was the sole pest control unit would kill it.

One learned to stay away from the little paths that led to heartbreak.

One day when we were at the kurob, my parents left me in charge of my younger siblings while they were in a place called Bagidanan to collect rice owed us. This was common practice that people who ran out of their rice supply early would borrow rice from those who still had it and pay it back in the next harvest season. I was just a little girl but responsible, able to cook rice and look after the baby. This time though it was night and my parents hadn’t come back. I had the rice cooking on an iron tripod but the baby cried and cried and wouldn’t stop. My Tio Joe and his wife and all my cousins were also in a kurob on the other half of the ricefield. They must have have heard the baby’s cries. He came over to our kurob and took the baby from me. Relieved, I finished cooking the rice.

Soon all was quiet.I went out into the night and looked for my uncle and the baby. They were up on the huyaban. This is a very high ladder made of the tallest bamboos one could find, with a small platform at the top shaded by a small nipa roof. My father and his men separated the chaff from the grain here by waiting for winds to blow and when they were just the right strength pouring the rice in a steady stream on to a big reed mat below . The chaff gathered in mounting piles at the sides outside the mat. When all was still, the men would take to a long drawn whistle supposed to call up the wind.

Tio Joe had taken the baby up there. He sat on the platform humming a song, the baby asleep in his arms.

uluru terrain

 

uluru terrain

Originally uploaded by anetz.

In October of 1993, we went to Alice Springs. Among the many things we wanted to do was to visit Ayers Rock or Uluru. To visit Uluru was one of those things which as an Australian I believe I have to do at least once in my lifetime, like a pilgrimage.

It is one of those few entities which dwell in the mind after a single exposure, be it a photograph or a film clip or even in an advertisement. Such is its power.

I had had a reinforcing exposure too, from books written by Robyn Davidson*. This was the reason I would not climb the rock. Because she had written: I wondered how they could stand watching people blundering around in fertility caves, or climbing the white painted line up the side, and taking their endless photos. If it had me almost to the point of tears, how much more it must have meant to them. There was one miserably small fenced-off section on the western side which read, ‘Keep out. Aboriginal sacred site‘.

My first sight of the rock was almost unexpected although I had strained my eyes for it the whole travelling day, through dust, van breakdown and an unexpected transfer to passing tourist coach. The country we were passing through was already distinctly different from the land I was used to along the coast of the Illawarra. This was theAustralia I used to read about as an impressionable young girl, the outback with the red earth, the red centre of Australia.

Uluru suddenly just was there, rising out of the flat land. It kept growing bigger. I hadn’t imagined its actual size accurately. One can’t because all those photographs had to be taken from a good distance to include the whole mass of it. As we drew closer to it, the rock looked purplish and for me it had a brooding quality, like it was alive and would soon show signs of that life. In what manner I didn’t know but I wouldn’t have been unaccepting if suddenly it had lit up, stirred or even spoken or sung.

The awe I felt before it bordered on an actual uneasiness thatwas almost fear.This awe did not last that whole afternoon. As we neared the perimeter of where they had a fence and signs that this was where photographers should station themselves, we found many already there ahead of us to wait for sunset and the colour changes that this was supposed to have on the rock’s appearance. It was too noisy, people were singing and toasting each other, more bottles of champagne being uncorked there than at the Bundeena beach picnics on a fine Sunday noon.

Very early in the morning the following day, we were there again, before the sun rose. Again the sense of awe and uneasiness filled me, turning to wonder as the sun slowly woke the rock. As in the afternoon before, this was dissipated by the noise and number of people this time going up the rock.

I went away from there changed at least in one perceptible way. I never say Ayers Rock anymore. It has become Uluru for me. The rock is ancient, mysterious and Uluru, the name by which the ancient people of this land call it seems infinitely more fitting than the European’s name for it. 

* Robyn Davidson is an Australian writer. She wrote the internationally acclaimed Tracks which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1980. It is the story of her 1,700 mile journey across the Australian desert and bush with four camels and a dog. She has written other books since but this remains my favourite.

purple and green in summer

purple and green in summer 

Originally uploaded by anetz.

Its seeds are winged and borne by the merest wind into the garden where they eagerly sprout into lacy leafed seedlings. I pull them up heartlessly. The garden is too small for the large trees they will eventually be.

This is a pity because jacarandas are so stunningly beautiful during the two weeks or so when they are in bloom. Every tree is a purple loveliness. But there is no shortage of them just across the street in the median strip and scattered generously over our city and suburbs.

As if in agreement with the neighbouring silky oaks, every tree bursts into glorious bloom over that short season- jacarandas purple, silky oaks orange.

This is a photo of one from last year’s trees in bloom. A jacaranda across the street from our mailbox. Taken with a toy camera with its soft focus and vignetting. A Diana +.

I celebrate a birthday

A celebrates her birthday

Originally uploaded by anetz.

Marking a milestone in life.

The place is also where we held our wedding reception so many years ago.

So many things have changed.

So many things will change.

Some things remain unchanged …

and will remain unchanged.

Dolls

Dolls

Originally uploaded by anetz.

From the first roll loaded into the other new old camera: a Hasselblad 500 C/M

When my late mother-in-law arrived from the UK to live in Australia, she brought this display cabinet and dolls and gave them to me. Except for two dolls in Thai costume and one in Filipina terno, all the dolls are souvenirs of trips she made overseas or presents from her sea faring husband. Some have dresses so old that they shred at the slightest touch. The French one has a head deformed by the passage to Australia despite precautions taken by the moving company.

Angel

Angel

Originally uploaded by anetz.

I was given two old cameras recently. They are heavy, flim-loading workhorses. Each felt brick-like when I first held it. Then when my hands grew familiar with their shapes and how best they fitted into my hands, that changed. Each now feels solid, stable. A safe, reliable feel.

This was from the first roll loaded into a Bronica S2A.

Noon, a city cemetery, an angel …