L'été est ici!

On Feb. 23, 2006, my journal entry reads: Summer is here! Exactly a year later, I write the same thing—summer is here! And indeed, summer IS here. Everything around me acknowledges this fact. The 32-33.5°C reading on the weather thermometer admits it is summer. The lazy dogs sprawled on the stone floors sigh in agreement that it is summer. The motionless trees state the obvious. The dying tarragon I tried desperately to coax to life all of December and January finally expired this week, its browning leaves a testament to my lack of horticultural skills and stupidity in growing a delicate herb in the humid plains of the south. The mating calls of feral cats in the dead of the night prove that it is in fact the warmest season of the year already.

Ah, summer, sweet summer. It was but a couple of weeks ago when everyone was enjoying the cool breezes coming all the way from China and before anyone at home knew what the hell was going on, before it was even reported in the news, I knew it was the northeasterly winds or “hanging amihan” because I’m simply a know-it-all like that.

Now, all of that was just a memory. Summer is back with a vengeance (blame global warming). Ah, but beyond the infernal heat, beyond the bladder acting up, summer and I have a shared history of happiness together. It was during the summers of my life that I did a lot of my growing up, suffered heartaches, and met new loves. It was summer when I learned how to bike and ride the skateboard. Summer when I danced my heart out and felt how wonderful it was to be young and alive. Summer when I read a lot of good books and discovered poetry and passion. It was summer when I had a boy tell me that I had the softest hands. Summer when I had my first tentative kiss and embrace. It was also summer when I met the boy with the gorgeous, kind eyes; who courted and wrote me poetry; gave me flowers and hickeys (he he); brought me to new places and introduced me to exotic things, and, eventually, married me (ha, fooled him!). So if only for the fact that summer led me to the wonderful life I now have, I say hooray summer! Hooray! 

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare
(1564 - 1616)

Beautiful then, still beautiful now.

In photography, one must have the "eye."

P's early attempt at digital photography using our first digital camera: a very low tech. Sony @ 2.something megapixels.

Lovely, lovely.

I love the mundane. Today, around noon, after having been forced by necessity to bathe the dogs (because they already stank), I walked out to a beautiful “vacation” weather. The sun was shining; making things (like plants, houses, and garden chairs) cast playful shadows on the pavement. I smiled at the pillowcases I soaped earlier in a basin of water and left out for sunning. The bubbles winked their hellos. There’s something about the afternoons here in the suburbs that hint of romance. Instead of the headache-inducing noise of the city, here, the lazy whirring of fans is broken only by the sounds made by house chores—the tink and clink of dishes being washed, the screeching of furniture being moved, and the scrubbing sounds emanating from the bathrooms. The house cook noisily putters around the kitchen creating a medley of her own sounds: chopping, beating, pounding, sautéing, frying, boiling. In the backyard, the sound of birds calling is sometimes overpowered by the occasional metallic “birds” that seem to hover a tad too close to rooftops for comfort, their engines like giant bees buzzing indifferently.

There is a quality to the Philippine daylight that borders on the exotic and intoxicating. Fernando Amorsolo had captured the myriad nuances of the Philippine sun in his many paintings. The afternoons in the Philippines are comparable to my idea of afternoons in the French or Italian countryside—the brilliance; the unapologetic heat that almost, but not quite, makes life grind to a halt or at most to a lazy stroll; the balmy breezes that are conducive to naps or lovemaking—or both! 

Seen on the mud guard of a privately owned jeep:

“Habang may gulay, may buhay.”