Tribute to our home

I am not afraid of typhoons.

Growing up in Aparri, it's a norm for us to welcome several typhoons in a year. We're like a tourist spot for typhoons. Typhoons visit us before going to Ilocos or Basco and eventually to HongKong or Taiwan. 

As a young child, I remember typhoons as moments when my siblings and I would stay upstairs and watch roofs flying like Aladdin's flying carpet.  If it comes at night, the fear would come not from the possibility that it might destroy our house but from the howling of the wind while we are trying to sleep because it sounds like what one would expect from a ghost.  As I grew older, my mother would ask me and my siblings to put rags or old clothes at the window sill to prevent rainwater from seeping through. If it's signal #3, we would tie our window handles to the grilles for reinforcement. My father would always have his flashlight beside him in case of a power outage at the middle of the night.  

Post typhoon, people are like mushrooms. They would sprout by the roadside to survey whose roof has been flown, which house has been destroyed, whose coconut tree has lost its fruits, how many electric posts or lamp posts have been toppled (this will indicate how long would the power outage be), whose carabao drowned in the river, etc etc. At home, we would be happy because our rainwater tanks would be full serving as an assurance that we will have enough drinking water until the summer season.  By dusk, people would go to the stores to buy kerosene for their lamps.  The following day, we will be back in school. If the chairs are wet, we'll bring them out to dry under the sun. Same with the books. The chalks and erasers too. 

This was our routine. 

From my young mind, typhoons were a hassle, not a disaster.  This was probably due to zero human casualties (as much as I could remember) at the end of it. And largely, because we were lucky to always had a home where we could sleep warmly at night.

Last Friday night, Typhoon Ompong made a painful impact in our lives. It massively damaged our home. 

Our home is 50+ years old. It was built in the 1960s when my uncle was in the Navy. The main house is a small square-ish type, about 40 sqm. As with every Filipino family's expansion plan in the past, my parents would extend it every time we would have extra money until it became bigger.

It was a humble home filled with many memories.  The sweet memories of Christmas mornings where we would wake up from the sound of our relatives voices in the kitchen. Christmas parties for me and my siblings' friends and classmates. Learning how to ride the bike from the living room to the kitchen. Navigating my way through itchy sacks of rice during the harvest season. The sound of my mother's voice once she comes back from the market.  Or the sound of my mother's voice on Saturday mornings asking us to get up and start helping with the household chores. Opting to spend an entire Saturday cleaning it when I was in high school.  It's a house where relatives, neighbors  and friends could always drop by for a cup of coffee and tinapay or a meal.  A house where neighbors and relatives could always borrow a salop of rice. Or ask for a gallon of drinking water from the tangke when theirs run dry.  It's also a place for more sombre occasions, the most recent of which was my father's wake 8 years ago.

From then, our house had nobody to constantly give shelter to. If my mother had her way, she would prefer to stay there for it is where she feels really at home. I understand. We understand. It is the house that she and my father had nurtured for our family.

Both of them have aged so much. My mother and our house. And both of them still try to nurture each other. Unfortunately, our house is much weaker. Maybe because compared to my mother, it's receiving less love and attention. We rarely go home to visit it. It doesn't receive regular check-ups and care (renovation).  Every time there's a news of a typhoon in Aparri, I pray that our house could withstand it. I imagine it to be a frail elderly who is still subject to the harshness of life. I know one day it will cave in. 

Learning about how strong the typhoon was, I was expecting to hear bad news about the house. Confirming that expectation was painful. I cried for a long time. It's a strong reminder of the passing of time. It feels like holding on to something that inevitably goes away. 

Seeing this photo, I still feel proud of how strong it is. This has withstood 50 years worth of typhoons. And even if the roof and one side of the wall has been damaged, it still stands. 

Thank you house. 

This is our house in June this year. Im glad that my boyfriend, my sister's husband, our friends and relatives still managed to see it in its original structure before it caved in.