Our Home

With Alvin and my sisters Marivic and Miner, I went home for your grandmother’s first year death anniversary last September 4.  While your Aunt Marivic arranged for a nine-day novena for the departed leading to the day commemorated, your Aunt Miner, with consummate foresight, asked one of her debtors to effect payment by raising the pig that was butchered for the occasion.   Alvin and I did the grocery shopping at SM Naga and Junior, with the help of the Naranjos, took charge of the food preparations.  For dessert, Auntie Telia whipped up her leche flan to supplement the fruit salad and panna cota prepared by your Aunt Marivic as well as the fruits Tiya Amparo brought. 

After the early morning mass, we visited your grandparent’s grave and went home for last minute preparations.  Lunch was a modest affair attended by relatives, neighbors and your grandmother’s friends and co-teachers.  A backward glance while leaving for Legaspi in the afternoon of the same day lodged the customary lump in my throat.  This never fails every time I find myself leaving home through the years. Home being the place where all seven of us grew up, I thought you should at least have an idea of its past.

Your grandparents started married life at the house we used to refer to as Kagranow, after the name of the Sitio on which it stood, in what is now Barangay Sta. Elena.  Right smack in the middle of the Buhi poblacion, with a lot area measuring 3,000 square meters, the property was the only inheritance your grandfather received from the estate of his adoptive father, Gregorio.  A sprawling one-storey wooden structure of nipa roof, the old house where your grandfather grew up had a porch, a sala, three bedrooms, a dining room, a big kitchen and, typical of houses then, a toilet/bathroom at the back.  I remember a big tamarind tree and bamboo at the backyard which was considerably wider than the frontage and spread out behind the neighboring houses, stretching way up the hill Busay.  It was at this place that your Aunt Marivic was born, followed by our stillborn brother, Juan.

Sharing a house with her husband’s then extended family did not, however, sit well with your grandmother who, as far as I gauged from the bits she let slip through the years, had difficulty adjusting to her in-laws.  While your grandfather always deferred to your grandmother for important family decisions, I can only imagine how the idea of moving out from your grandfather’s childhood home must have been an early but major test of wills for your grandparents.   Your grandmother was, however, the more decisive of the pair so, from there, your grandparents moved to San Roque, renting the ground floor of the two-storey Spanish house owned by Lola Cecing – Mrs. Cecilia Importante.  She was, in turn, the sister of Lola Eping, the matriarch of the rich Constancio family into whose service your grandfather found himself as a young lad.  

Although born at the Mediatrix Hospital in Iriga City on account of your grandmother’s previous caeasarian operation, your Auntie Eva, if memory serves, was conceived at this place.  Mementos from this stage of your grandparents’ life include a picture taken of your grandfather in his police uniform before the commodious sala of the house and another of your grandmother, cuddling your then bald Aunt Marivic, at the foot of its grand, tiled stairs. 

The family next rented the Sta. Elena abode of the widowed Tiya Nena Llorente, a mere stone’s throw away from the place where your grandparents eventually established our family home.  With your Auntie Eva a little over a year old, it was at this place where your Uncle Junior, myself and your Aunt Miner were brought home from the hospital in annual succession. 

Relatively small for an extended family that included your grandparents, your great grandmother Petra, our Aunts who were then studying, five children and three maids, this house is the situs of my earliest memories.  Those who could not be accommodated in its two bedrooms had to sleep on the floor of the sala and the small pasillo that led to the biggest part of the house – the dining room and kitchen.  The backyard had an outhouse in the shade of a big santol tree which bore sweet fruit in summertime. 

The one furniture I remember from this time is your grandmother’s narra aparador or cabinet – the very same one now placed at the room where she drew her last breath.   I’ve come to associate this fixture with the scent of the apples there secreted with the chocolates with which your grandmother annually filled our Christmas stockings in those years.  

As your grandparents both worked, household concerns were entrusted to our two househelps, Lydia and Maria, who were remembered for their dedicated service and good disposition long after they left to have families of their own.  I was, by all accounts, a troublesome infant and kept the household awake well into the small hours with my incessant crying.  For this reason, your grandparents engaged a young girl to attend to me, the only child in our brood of seven who had a kindly yaya of his own.  Appropriately named Caring, she was a generous helping hand during your grandmother’s wake.

The sale of the 150 square meter lot on which our house stands was reportedly brokered by Lola Justina, the wife of Lolo Garito who was, in turn, the brother of your grandfather’s adoptive father.    The entire lot was initially devoted to a large, wooden structure which housed the rice and corn mills your grandmother maintained to augment the family income.  From the Llorente’s house, we transferred to the nearby house of Tiyo Pedro and Tiya Daria Bernal in San Roque.  

By then the baby of the family, your Aunt Tingting maintained a lifelong closeness to this couple we all called by the endearments “Ido” and “Aying”.  With their only son, Salvador or Adong, already grown up and based in Manila, they practically considered Ting their daughter to such a proprietary point that she called the former Istambay on the rare occasion that he went home. 

It was around this time that the structure for the rice and corn mills was torn down to give way to the construction of our first family home.  The construction of the two-storey house was primarily financed by a loan from the GSIS in the sum of P1,500.00.  It had a porch or balcon from which, upon opening the sliding door of wood and glass, one entered the sala which occupied about a third of the ground floor.  To the right was an L-shaped staircase to the second floor and the dining room which, in turn led into the kitchen.  From the left, the kitchen adjoined a bedroom and, from the right, the main toilet/bathroom.  

The backdoor opened into the concrete but smaller structure that housed the rice and corn mill tended by the diminutive but strong Tiyo Bildo as machinist and by Ido as overseer.  At a little space of about six square meters in between this structure and the house, your grandmother had a pigpen that customarily housed two pigs which were fattened with the family’s leftovers and later sold to augment the budget for our education.  Because of its proximity to the house, the pen and its inhabitants had to be kept meticulously clean – from Junior downwards, we all took our turn tending to this pen, scrubbing laundry soap suds over the pigs’ bodies with a plastic brush and hosing them down.  They became such pets your grandmother usually left the house whenever the time came for them to be inevitably sold or butchered.

Over the landing of the second floor was installed the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus – the very same icon now enthroned over the bookshelves your Aunt Miner caused to be built. To the left was the small pasillo which led into the balcony or azotea directly above the porch.   The place where we had our daily rosary in front of a wooden table on which stood the statue of the Sto. Nino and the Blessed Mother, the pasillo, with its direct ventilation from the azotea, was ideal for afternoon siesta and, later, for reading the books that your grandmother bought us.  

To the right of the pasillo were the boys’ and girls’ bedrooms and, slightly to the left, our parent’s bedroom and the second floor toilet.  Because of faulty plumbing, this spare toilet later became a storage room of sorts.  Weekends were spent housecleaning, with each one of us allotted our assigned areas under the supervision of our Aunt Telia.

To the right of the house was a paved walkway for the careta used to deliver the palay and corn to be milled.  Over it was a trellis for white squash, with what available soil planted with our Aunt Telia’s ornamental plants and your grandmother’s papaya trees.  Later, I helped Aunto Telia plant two mango trees, only one of which grew into maturity and bore abundant fruit of a variety best enjoyed when half-ripe.  Staying out late as teenagers, your Uncle Junior and Aunts Miner and Tingting used this tree to gain access to house thru the azotea, their curfew violations nevertheless detected by your watchful grandfather.

It was to this house that your Uncle Alvin was brought home from the hospital.  I used to sing him to sleep on a hammock tied to the wooden post which supported the pasillo and on which was installed the family pendulum clock that your grandfather customarily wound up.

The house was rebuilt after Typhoon Sining’s path of destruction in the early seventies reduced about 95% of the houses in Buhi roofless. With all of us taking refuge at the sturdy Gonzaga house, your grandfather stayed home and braved the worst of the calamity under our dining table. The construction defects of the first structure was painstaking corrected by Mr. San Pedro who was, for a long while, practically a member of our extended family.   

This house  saw most of us growing up, leaving to pursue our further education and returning during vacations.  It was where your grandfather hanged his shingles as a Notary Public after his retirement and where he eventually died. The only fixtures that remain from this house are the dining table in our current home, the bed and cabinet in what used to be your grandmother’s bedroom, Auntie Telia’s bed, dresser and cabinet and the queen size bed upstairs. 

With all of us employed elsewhere, the house became too big for your grandmother who, with her own retirement gratuity, decided to embark on her last major project.  The house was torn down and rebuilt to its current state under the supervision of your Aunt Marivic’s brother-in-law, Engr. Suelo Abano, your Auntie Eva and Uncle Alvin.  The improvements and narra fixtures you see there now are, on the other hand, the projects your Auntie Miner commissioned every time she went on vacation these last five years.  

After living most of her retirement years with your Aunt Marivic, your grandmother spent the last two years of her life in this house. 

With your grandmother gone, going home has, for the moment, lost its former appeal.  The house, to be sure, never fails to summon memories, but one feels the sense of emptiness your grandmother must have felt when we left to pursue our individual lives.  Having known no other home, however, I suspect that, in time, most of us will return to it.