The Nameless Home

 

I still have not found the appropriate word or phrase to describe my home at Manggaean. My family and I have lived here since October 2003. We were four when we moved in. In 2008, Aurea Vera was given to us as a gift from God, our golden truth. And yet, even when she was taken back last October 11, 2026, the place remained nameless.

Some strangers call ours the haunted house by the bend, as the thick canopy of trees enveloping it keeps the house hidden from passing motorists.  At night, however, passersby wonder at the light spilling through the trees, as though it were bursting out of nowhere. My wife, on the other hand, loved describing her sweet daughters as the Engkantada ni Al sa Likuan—the Fairies of Al by the Bend.

A name would be useful for practical reasons. It would help couriers deliver our parcels, the occasional postal worker finds our address (postage delivery having become something of a rara avis), and public transport operators identify the place. More than that, a name would give the house a distinct identity in the eyes of the public.

Our home stands alone at one of the many bends along Manggaean, now considered part of Sitio Campitan, Barangay Aranas, along the Aklan East Road. This particular bend, however, has acquired a reputation as one of the more menacing places in Balete. The old people called it Baeaeuan—a spooky place where elementals were said to dwell and play tricks on passing motorists.

To the secular mind, it is simply an accident-prone stretch of road. Many motorists have met accidents here, some of them fatal. Human error, intoxication, exhaustion, and sleepiness have all played their part. The road climbs at an incline of about fifteen to twenty degrees, bends one way, turns in the opposite direction, and then bends back again. Its successive curves can play tricks on the reflexes of even a weary driver. Just beside our house, the road crosses a nameless creek.

Our home has served on several occasions as a temporary infirmary for unsuspecting motorists who met misfortune along the way. The girls would readily help us attend to the injured and ease their pain. Our porch became a place of refuge for their battered bodies, offering them a brief respite until rescue arrived. The gated space in front of the house served as a temporary parking area for their damaged vehicles.

In the 1970s, the creek teemed with life. In the 1990s, its water was diverted into a small impounding reservoir to irrigate the vast ricelands of the Calizo family. The creek managed to survive, though it became something like a dagaas-linaw—a body of water that often dries up during long rainless months. A spring near our property continues to feed it, allowing the creek to flow, albeit with less life to sustain. I remember seeing freshwater eels in it on several occasions in the mid-2000s.

The nameless home has now been visited by death. With Aurea Vera's passing this year, it has become no stranger to the pangs and pain that death brings to those who remain. The house and the Baeaeuan seem to speak the same ancient lesson: life is fleeting as creek water in summer, yet abundant while it flows.

Thus, they remind us not only of our mortality but also of our duty to live.

 

THE STORIES OF THE RINGS

 

I simply want to preserve the humor that resides within the otherwise exacting relationship between the I and the Thou. That is why I am writing this piece on the Stories of the Rings.

Certain relationships are marked by rings and their curious evolution. Take, for instance, two people who agree to be friends and commemorate the occasion with a Friendship Ring. At a certain point, the ring evolves into an Engagement Ring. And from there, those reckless souls, perhaps armed with nothing more than optimism and a sense of humor, proceed to what they call a Wedding Ring.

But once the honeymoon is over and reality acquires its sharp teeth, the ring often becomes a Suffering. Through these transitions, some emerge stronger, and their rings may rightly be called Enduring. For the weak, however, the story takes a different turn. Their rings become Terering.

In Inakeanon, terering means losing one's sound mind, as though the bolts in one's head have come loose. It is perhaps the final transformation of the ring: from a symbol worn on the finger to a condition endured in the mind.

 

REMEMBER HER SMILE

 

My friends, my family—

As you know, my youngest daughter, Aurea Vera, gave up her life at the twilight of October 11, 2026. She was eighteen.

She was born on May 13, 2008, at the Balete Birthing Clinic of the Pacita C. Cortes Health Center, once the Balete Puericulture Center. She was the last child my mother, a newly retired Supervising Midwife, helped bring into the world. The nation was then embroiled in the NBN-ZTE scandal, with truth rallies taking to the streets. Amid that clamor for transparency, our family found its own golden truth. We called her Av.

She was our laughter and our tears, our innocence and our scars. She was woven into the fabric of our family, as we were into hers.

Scarred since childhood, she wrestled with her demons. Yet she was strong, as her mother was strong in her love and support. She was sweet, as her sisters showered her with affection. She was kind, and her friends were never far, ready to offer companionship, or the distance she sometimes needed.

She has gone ahead of us.

We will miss her.

It hurts beyond words to look upon her lifeless body. Yet perhaps more painful still is to feel her absence in the ordinary spaces of our lives. For a man who has pretended to be stoic, almost Promethean in his resolve, her death strips away every pretense. It lays bare the vulnerability of one who thought he had mastered composure.

She has gone ahead of us.

And the manner of her going leaves us with questions we may never answer. She took her own life. She left no note.

There was only that Sunday we had shared, an ordinary day now made extraordinary by memory. She massaged her father's aching back. She refilled the empty water jug. She laughed with her sisters, playfully scolding them and their mother for being too boisterous. She spent the afternoon with her boyfriend. Nothing in these recollections explains her going. They are simply the moments we shared, now immeasurably precious.

She has gone ahead of us.

Her absence feels absolute.

Yet I keep returning to that last smile, the sweet smile she gave us before going into her room.

I want to remember her smile.

Not because it explains her going. Not because it eases the pain. But because it was hers. Because she was here. Because, for all the pain she carried and all the questions she left unanswered, she was our Av.

And we loved her.

We thank our Christian community, our relatives, our friends, our fellow Baleten-ons, and all who have come to walk with us in this valley of sorrow. Your presence reminds us that grief need not be borne alone.

Above all, I thank God for lending Av to us for eighteen years. Eighteen years of laughter and tears, of struggles and triumphs, of wounds and healing, of memories that will forever remain part of who we are.

And I thank Av.

For even in her passing, she has awakened many of us to the things that truly matter. In our sorrow, we have been reminded to pray. We have been reminded to forgive. We have been reminded to love. We have been reminded that every moment shared with those entrusted to us is a gift and a grace.

Remember her smile.

Please remember her in your prayers.

May God, in His infinite mercy, grant her eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her.

Amen.

 

(Updated on October 17, 2026)

 

  

Joecab

I saw Joyce from a distance yesterday afternoon. He was at the poultry supply, perhaps buying goods for his game fowls.

Joyce is a friend from my childhood in rural Balete. We grew up together, went to the same school, and were tutored by the same teachers from Grade 1 to 6 at Balete Elementary School. We were playmates, though not exactly the best of friends. We had our share of differences, and when diplomacy failed, we let our fists settle the matter.

 Old Baleten-ons called him Joecab—a monicker he earned for being the grandson of Old Lo Bador, the original “bagoe.” As you already know, Balete is notorious for giving a second baptism to its favored sons and daughters, christening them with monickers apt to capture certain characteristics in their persons. Thus, Joyce became Joecab, a combination of his first name and his grandfather’s “patented” nickname—not to mention that he was always sporting shaven head we used to enjoy rubbing with a chunk of goso.

 I was on my way home yesterday when I saw him standing before the poultry supply along T.F. Calizo Ave. He acknowledged my passing with a nod and a smile. Something in that smile somehow reminded me of a particular event in our lives—not when we were toddlers playing bricks and goso at the plaza, but when we were already grappling with the puzzle of puberty.

 You see, despite the feminine sound of his name, Joecab was a raging bull. He was already brimming with testosterone in his youth. On one occasion, he quipped, addressing the entire barkada:

 “Tao kon sin-o katon kara iya ro mauna makapangasawa?”

 But that’s not what I recalled yesterday upon seeing him. What I remembered was that particular instance in Mapait, one summer night…

 “This song,” Joecab proclaimed in his loud baritone voice, breaking the silence of the night, “is lovingly and heartily dedicated to Miss—Sin-o ngani to, pre?”

Thus began our harana, or serenade, to a young and beauteous vacasionista.

 As you also know, Joecab had a good singing voice and was a self-taught acoustic player. He was one of those few animators in our group of friends who could turn a simple gathering into festive carousing. Just let him strum his guitar to the tune of Tantaloyloyloy.

 Those were the days!

That’s Joecab.

And he was the first among us to get hooked.

Owning the Church of the Poor

Msgr. Adolfo Depra used to speak of the Church of Balete as truly the Church of the Poor. He made that remark sometime in the 1990s, after celebrating the High Mass during the Feast of St. Rafael the Archangel, which had been rescheduled to October 23 instead of the traditional October 24.

In those days, the roles of the local Church and the civil government in the fiesta were clearly defined. The Church was not trying to take over what did not belong to her. She was simply claiming what was rightly hers.

The fiesta was a religious event. As such, the Church strove to manifest the truth of Christian life in every facet of its celebration: in the preparation, in the celebration itself—from Day 1 of the novena to its culmination—and even in the evaluation afterward. The fiesta was meant to be a witnessing to the ideals of our brotherhood in Christ Jesus; never merely a festal gathering of frenzy and wild abandon.

Perhaps this was what it meant to be a Church of the Poor: not simply to stand with the poor, but to protect what was sacred to them, even when doing so meant confronting the habits and interests that had gradually taken possession of the fiesta.

To claim the fiesta was therefore not to claim power over the people. It was to reclaim a meaning that belonged to the people in the first place.

And perhaps this is where the Church had to be both pastoral and prophetic. Pastoral, because it knew the people and their lived realities; prophetic, because it could not simply bless whatever had become customary. It had to ask whether our customs still bore witness to what we professed to believe.

The question was never: Who owns the fiesta?

The deeper question was: What has the fiesta become—and what does it say about us?

For a Church of the Poor, that question could not be avoided.

BETOK, THE DUMUEUONG THAT HAS TAKEN ROOT AT LAST

 

MY FATHER was regarded by his peers as an outsider, a newcomer—a dumueuong.

He was a jack of all trades from Sitio Hueaton who married my mother of the Flogio-Perez clan of Sitio Pinamunitan. He built our first home on a parcel of land by a nameless creek in Pinamunitan, Batan, Aklan—a wedding gift from my grandparents, Eli and Curoy.

It was a paradise. Birds sang without fear, and the creek ran clear, sheltering fishes of every kind: puyo, pantat, aeogsok, oeang, sili, and more. It was there that our family began.

In 1973, with our growing family of five, he moved us to Balete and settled in a small hut behind the old puericulture center. The decision was practical, but in retrospect it seems almost providential.

My mother had just been hired as the town's midwife. She worked alongside a lady-doctor from Banga and a nurse who was the mayor's wife, and who would later become an “accidental mayor” herself. Soon after, my father was appointed Sanitary Inspector, serving first with old Tay Jamin Rafol and later with Tay Lende Barrios.

Yet despite his position and authority, the old tumandok—the true Baleten-ons—still regarded him as a dumueuong.

He bore the stigma with a mixture of derision and defiance. When intoxicated, he would sometimes rail against those who called him an outsider.

“Bah! They call me dumueuong—those without roots to boast about. Remember, Al, you are deeply rooted in this land. Your forebears were here long before those hypocrites came around.”

He would then recount the lineage of our clan, naming Dela Cruzes, Gomezes, Marcialeses, Rebenitos, Gallardezes, Teodosios, Tamayos, Redondos, and others.

In adulthood, I went looking for those names in the archives. His boast was not entirely a drunkard's invention. He was indeed descended from families whose roots reached deep into the history of the place. Perhaps that knowledge gave him the courage to ignore the label others had given him. Or perhaps the label itself made him more determined to prove that he belonged.

In the late 1970s, he astonished Balete by building a house out of coco-lumber. “What on earth is coco-lumber?” people scoffed. He answered not with words but with a shining, sturdy, termite-resistant house.

He bought a chainsaw, introducing it to Balete for the first time, and taught his Tamayo cousins, along with others, how to use it. He then made coco-lumber available to Baleten-ons as a cheaper alternative to good lumber. With his Rebenito uncles, he established a furniture shop. Their craftsmanship found its way into homes across Balete and beyond—tables and cabinets made from naga, dao, apitong, kamagong, and other hardwoods.

In 1982, he left for Saudi Arabia as an OFW. Two years later, he returned home and took over the management of our family's fishpond in Pinamunitan. He turned it into a thriving aquaculture venture, raising milkfish, tiger prawns, and mud crabs. To protect its earth dikes from the tides and flood, he planted nipa palm along the river.

By the late 1980s, his Teodosio cousins persuaded him to open what would become Balete's first hardware store. With little capital, he sought help from Fr. Tito, who was skeptical of the venture. But my father's conviction prevailed, and together they founded Balete Mini-Hardware. Through it many sturdy houses sprouted like mushrooms in Balete. The partnership did not last long, but the business prospered. It opened another door for him—this time into small-scale government contracting.

For the first time, perhaps, leisure seemed within reach. But success brings its own temptations. In midlife, pride and desire proved stronger than discipline. The ventures that had once carried him forward gradually slowed, then faded into silence.

Life, however, has a way of bringing us back to where we began. In his final years, my father returned to Pinamunitan. There, on the land where his journey had begun, he built a simple hut. He planted fruit trees, mahogany, acacia, and eucalyptus. I gave him a water pump and had a deep well installed, sparing him the burden of fetching water from the murky creek.

He died quietly on the early morning of January 3, 2024, at the age of eighty-two. His remains are now entombed on the quiet hill of Balete Cemetery. No longer a dumueuong. The land had finally claimed him as its own.

By then, our family had grown from five to eight. Five of his six children had families of their own. His fruit trees bore fruit for children who would never know the man who planted them. His hut was vandalized. His pump was stolen. The land grew forested. And the creek—the same creek that once ran clear and sheltered puyo, pantat, aeogsok, oeang, and sili—now struggled to breathe.

Perhaps that is what remains of a life in the end: not the houses he built, the businesses he started, or the things he accumulated, but the roots he leave behind.

My father was called a dumueuong because others thought he had no roots here. He spent his life proving otherwise.

 

OF CARPENTERS AND OLD SONGS

 

Old songs are doorways to yesterdays. On Sundays, I make it a ritual to listen to them—the ballads of the fifties, sixties, and seventies—not merely for their melodies, but for the rhythm they awaken in memory. 

They carry me back to afternoons beside my mother as she repaired a broken bariw mat. Her hands moved with quiet precision, each movement a beat in the rhythm of her day. As the lone midwife to a community of some fifteen thousand souls, perhaps this small act of mending was her way of resting from the heavy demands of her calling. I was told to take my siesta, but I resisted. I hated siestas. Instead, I rolled a pencil across the mat like a toy car while the afternoon stretched lazily around us. The movement of her hands, the rolling of my pencil, the drowsy heat—somehow, they have remained with me. 

The old songs take me there. They take me to the old house by the puericulture center, and later to my father’s furniture shop. There, the local panday worked with the quiet confidence of men who knew their craft. They arrived before seven, their pomaded hair already part of the morning scene. At nine, they paused for breakfast—sinabawan nga sapsap sa kamatis o eba—which they loved enough to sip down to the last drop. Fifteen minutes later, they were back at work. They labored until eleven, broke for lunch, took a strict one-hour siesta, and returned at exactly one. At five, they tidied the site, gathering their waste and leaving the workplace almost as they had found it that morning. 

There was a discipline to their hours, but there was also something gentler in it—a rhythm of work, food, rest, and work again that belonged to the life of the town itself. 

And so the old songs bring all these back: my mother mending the mat, the carpenters shaping wood in the afternoon light, the taste of broth, and the stubborn boy who thought an hour of sleep was an hour stolen from living. They bring back a way of life I did not know I was witnessing. 

I miss them. I miss those Sunday afternoons. 

Last Sunday, I switched on my phone’s Bluetooth to my Marshall. There, The Carpenters began to sing, and it is yesterday once more. 

Songs do not return the past exactly as it was. They return fragments of it—the sounds, textures, tastes, movements, and feelings that somehow survived in us. The old panday built the houses and furniture of my childhood. The Carpenters now help rebuild them in memory.