Summer's Ending

The smell of rain constantly effuses a feeling that resembles those days in June. This is not the rainy season maybe but the drizzle for three consecutive days makes us feel that we’re up to days of tripping down damp passages and eternal longing for lukewarm baths. The teacher said it was too early for summer’s ending and that if there are really sunny days to speak of for the past months this should not be the time to end it. He has a scheduled vacation in
Palawan next week he boasts. And everybody was envious of course.

Back at home, the memory of summer’s ending is quite downbeat. It was like a mourning of the complete departure of solitary walks to feel the coarseness of the warm sand during afternoons and the endless dipping in the brackish waters of the nearby river during high tide. It was also because of the grown fear of tempests that brought long days of heavy rains and the necessary in-door predilections that breathe a momentary discreet attitude among souls. Continuous outpouring would make dams overflowing with rain water and because we’re near the outlet rivers our lives became prone to soak-yourself-in-floodwaters-in-eternity life. Part-smile and part-frown for the devastation and it makes us love the place more. I don’t know why.

Once in days of childhood, an enormous water spout that visited the community ravaged some houses and uprooted some of late Tinio’s bananas at the back of his house. I saw him came close to the water spout with his bolo swinging in the air like a desperate man trying to outdo the troop of hundreds with his lone bolo in a heroic stance: fighting to death. I confessed such incident to my mother hoping that she would do something to cure Tinio’s psychosis. She only responded with cracks of laugh. I came to know that such is not a sign of madness it was an attempt to shatter the swirling water spout.

There is more to the memories of the start of the rainy days.

But, could the premature downpour be brought by global warming? Oh, and there’s the little child surmising the indelible fact of divinity in the offing. Oh I see, yours is a life of dreams and comic interpretation of phenomena that beat old wisdom and false truths in this world.