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!
