At nighttime, and as kids back then, we enjoyed our endless exchange of stories. Under a full moonlight, and graced by flickering fireflies that adorned the towering bamboo grasses nearby, our nights as kids in the farm always exude creativity and learning. With a kerosene lamp lighted in the midst, the flow of authentic and sincere stories that were unveiled and told from a child’s heart seems incessant. Sitting on the wooden floor and in semicircle, we laughed over local stories that never lacked actions by those listless characters from among the group. We talked until the wee hours with unusual soundtracks, the soothing rhymes and a cappella songs of nocturnal insects-the crickets, the annoying mosquitoes and the croaking frogs and then that concerto was abruptly ended by a somber note sung by a helpless fowl, constricted by a predator reptile that broke inside our bamboo cage below the house.
We crafted our own scary evening surprises. Under those dark footpaths leading to the rice paddies, we constructed our bobby traps of luminous mushrooms (jack-o-lantern) along the way, usually gathered from rotten stumps of dying trees; these were aimed to terrify any bypassers. We too were once victims of those homemade scarecrows and trappings from indigenous plants, concocted by our unrelenting cousins aiming to get even at us. And we had lots of laughter as turbulent kids on that forgotten rice farm then.
In 1991, that rice farm was dismantled to give way for the more promising banana plantation. All growing seeds, tall fruit trees, and the rice paddies were razed down to oblivion. Now, only a few family photos are left as mementos of that memorable rice field that we all grew up with. The sight of birds at the back of a buffalo that was in respite, after its daylong toil, this was captured in this child’s memory. The swarm of migratory birds’ clinging like canopies of trees is vividly stored inside memory disk. There was no camera then, no digital device to capture all those irretrievable natural sights. The details were sensibly captured from our past youthful days; these were embedded permanently and unraveled only this time.
Old laughter is still inside us, and like a chrysalis of worm inside its cocoon, every time we get into our family gatherings, the dormant stories, and those memories of youthful adventures that took place on that lost paradise, suddenly it reappear like a colorful butterfly. Our grandparents are no longer around to laugh with us, but every time the endless bantering of jokes and laughter begins to fill the air, we know by heart that Lolo and Lola are always there to laugh with us. At the reeling of those animated childhood adventures, projected and viewed on that imaginary wide screen, the nostalgia about the farm brings joy and tears, and some trivial family feuds are momentarily mortified and perhaps buried towards eternity which time alone can tell.