HOME UNDER ONE'S HOUSE

The scene of most of the pleasant memories of my childhood, I think I honestly believe, happened in Balite, Calumpit, Bulacan.
Ahh, childhood.
There was an old house where we lived. I never knew it was not ours. It was a big house with I could-not-remember how many rooms. Old house of stilt made of then traditional wood and galvanized iron roof – and we were happy. I was happy we had a house. There were so many chapters in that childhood that I could not decipher, and I never tried to understand including why we should be driven away from that house. If being driven away from a home of what a toddler like me then could not be called a pleasant memory, what? Wasn't it dramatic, anyway?
By the way, let us have a brief rewind: My mother was a daughter of my grandfather from one of his many – how many I don't know and didn't care to know – wives. Being in that situation in this conservative (prude) Filipino family setting, my mother Charing had to suffer the fate of a dramatic character of Charito Solis or Rosa Rosal being shooed away from the brood. I remember I tried to understand that scene, one of the pleasant memories of my childhood.
I enjoyed the little childish things in that place together with my cousins as we played hide-and-seek. The hiding place were the big lying trunks of mango trees, behind the big trunk of another tree, inside the toilet stinking of urine and other unwanted odors – but not the often portrayed saya (loose skirt) of an old woman in some old comical movies of Dolphy. Taguan or hide-and-seek was more thrilling at night when the full moon was on the rise. The moon's shadow always kept some secret, I learned later, and that secret I used in hiding from the “it” until it was time to call it “game”. How pleasant my childhood in Balite was.
My parents had no choice but to leave the house which for a while I learned to call ours – and I still think now it was ours if not only for the intrigues spread by some relatives that my mother just silently avoided. We moved to a room under one's house, and I was ashamed whenever other neighborhood children would refer me as “nakatira sa silong”.
Ahh, pleasant memories...