Ilang Nanay

I've never been the person who gets to travel a lot. Although I would have loved to go places, the best I’ve been to was Baguio City, and I wasn’t even there to have fun riding horses and eating strawberries; I was there for a semi-mandatory convention. I have gone to Bohol as well, but I can’t say I enjoyed it so much because my mom just tagged us along on her seminar and my stepdad wasn’t really the enjoyable type of companion for sightseeing trips. I have been to several beaches and resorts too, but I’m not really much of a beach bum and I don’t like what seawater does to my hair. What I’m really saying is that my list of Memorable Places I’ve Been To is not much of a list yet and frankly, it doesn't really bother me. My best memories have been at home, and no matter how sparkly travel brochures get, there is really only one place I can call my favorite: my great grandmother’s (Nanay’s) house.

It stands at the center of our town, a two-storey home built sometime during the 1930s. It is made of brick and has a brownish color that almost looks red in the sunlight. The first floor is where my great grandmother’s store is located. She used to sell clothes and crayons and guitars, but when my cousins and I were still little kids, the store had been our playground and the items our playthings. Needless to say, most of what she could have sold were either missing some vital parts or completely broken. They eventually stopped selling things that we could break and brought in the nails, the paint, the hinges, and strangely enough, the toilet bowls.

There is a screen door that separates the store from the living room, which is spacious enough for more than twenty people to laugh with each other during family dinners, or for the same number of people to shout at each other during family fights. I remember a time when there was a drought and the whole town lost its supply of water. Everybody was shouting, all twenty of my uncles and aunts, including my grandparents and great grandparents, probably because somebody used up all of the water in the house. There were fingers pointing, voices rising, doors slamming—I had never seen anything so chaotic in my life. But then, when they were not shouting, they usually laughed, talked about business and politics, and teased us children about our crushes. When nobody fought or laughed, everybody cried. That living room had seen four caskets and heard numerous prayers; its walls had echoed the sound of our tears. That living room is where we are a family.

Straight ahead is the kitchen, which has a high ceiling and always smells of paksiw and rice. There is a big and long table at the middle where the adults talk while drinking. Sometimes it is where we children sit, helping ourselves with a hearty meal and a hearty conversation with one another. We even cook there sometimes, although we don’t always come up with something edible. Then there is also that old broken piano inconspicuously sitting at the corner. None of us ever had the luxury of playing it because none of us ever learned how. Nanay and Tatay just bought it because their neighbor had a piano and they just had to have one for themselves.

The stairs that lead to the second floor has a shiny brown banister. As children, we always had fun sliding down on it when the steps looked too many to take.  We would hurt our groins but we would just laugh it away. The second floor has a big window at the center of the first corner wall. It is always open, and its view overlooks the whole town plaza. We used to just squeeze ourselves together against its frames, look below, and make fun of the people who passed by. During New Year's Eve, it is where we watch fireworks. Most nights we would just play cards or Marco Polo until we tire each other out. When it got late and none of us wanted to leave, our parents let us stay, although only after some considerable whining. My grandparents would then take out all the banig, and my cousins and I would huddle together under the covers talking until every one of us fell asleep. In the morning, we would go down and have corned beef and hotdogs for breakfast. On rare occasions, there would be pancakes. It didn’t really matter though what our grandmother made us eat; we enjoyed it all just the same.

Of course, there is the good old backyard where we used to play hide and seek. Our grandfather would scare us from playing by telling us stories of the agta and the duwende. It scared us to bits that until now, none of us dare to stay there for more than five minutes. But then I remember pretty decent memories in that backyard, like when I used to help my grandfather fix his car or feed my uncle’s fighting cocks. Sometimes I got to brush their feathers.

Outside, the house looks exactly like my old great grandmother Nanay Toning who passed away in 2007: worn-out, wrinkly, and tired. Inside, also just like her, Nanay’s house is bursting with energetic laughter and memories. I don’t think I need to be in Paris or Tokyo or any other place to be able to write something wonderful and spectacular. I have a lot of wonderful memories and spectacular moments in that house. I know I will never tire of its familiarity and closeness. In fact, those are what make it so special to me. “Mangadto ta ilang Nanay” will forever be a phrase I will always delight in hearing.