Quite recently, I’ve been having flashes of my childhood memories growing up in Mindanao. My childhood memories are rich with images of the countryside, long bus rides through mountain tops and coastal roads.
When I started college, the bus rides turned into overnight boat rides and the boat rides turned into more frequent flights. But I always found the bus rides and boat rides more memorable. The long stretch of time spent sitting and looking out into the landscape afforded more daydreaming and introspection. This may have caused such memories to be steeped in my subconscious.
A couple of days ago, my mom sent us a photo of a letter my father wrote to her while she was away for further studies. We were living inside a university campus then in Bukidnon. Our parents were young university instructors. I don’t remember for how long my mom was away but my earliest memories were from that time in my life. It might only have been less than a year. I was three and time to a child feels like an eternity.
Memories of a mountain
We lived in a forested, mountainous territory. My memories are flashes of bicycle rides, deer and snakes, hikes through the forest, and afternoons playing with our neighbours. I would scramble in the kitchen to find tomatoes to feed the deers roaming in front of our house. My playmates and I would forage cacao fruit, collect rubber tree seeds and rub them together to create heat.
We would look for tiny bugs we called “baboy-baboy” and make them race each other.
On one such occasion when I was looking for bugs under our house, I found my puppy stiff dead. “A snake may have bitten him.” My nanny told me, and I wailed and screamed in anger. Why would she place my puppy outside if she knew snakes abound the area?
My father held a funeral for my puppy. I think he even had his friends attend, I remember it being a full-on ceremony. It was held in the forested area behind our house. In the middle of the forest was a trash pit. My memory is a bit hazy but they may have laid him to rest there. But I remember seeing a snake. At the time I was sure it was a cobra. I thought “the snake that killed him attended his funeral.” I was livid. Those were my earliest memories of rage, anger, and grief.
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Snakes abound
Snakes came to visit our homes every so often. One time, while I was playing hide and seek with my nanny, I looked underneath our couch. I knew she wouldn’t fit in there but even as a child I wasn’t quite so logical. So I peeked underneath out of curiosity and saw a snake. I
informed my mother and they quickly ran to tell our neighbour. When our neighbour arrived, he couldn’t find the snake but I had an eerie feeling that it had moved underneath the doorway rug. When my dad came home from work, I told him my theory. He checked underneath the rug and there it was. That snake.
Because there were a lot of venomous snakes in the area, the adults couldn’t take chances and the snake met its end. My father had a long leather “baston” used for such purpose. That same afternoon, we took a family photo. Someone had sneakily placed the dead snake in my back pocket as a joke. That was the first and last time I got spooked by snakes.
A finder’s eye
That was also when my mom started to notice I had an uncanny skill for finding lost things.
Growing up, I’d often be asked to look for missing objects around the house, and I would find them almost always. I’d like to chalk the start of my “finder” skills to when I looked for my nanny underneath the couch.
Looking for things in places one least expects, whether logical or not. These days I would say things like “if I were a key, where would I be?” or I would call on the Patron Saint of Lost Things, Saint Anthony de Padua. Some days I don’t try too hard. Certain things always appear when you least need them.
Those memories felt like stretches of long afternoons. As a child, everyone was away- at work or school. I was mostly left to my own devices but instead of waiting, I would end up getting into all sorts of adventures and trouble. Even without the gadgets, the world I lived in was rarely boring.
