Tarlac Dike by Kerima Polotan Essay Example

the tongue no matter how far one has gone and what diverse tables one has sat at.

I had a good friend then who would later become one of the richest women in the province (or so I’m told): but I don’t suppose she cares to remember the nipa hut she used to lived in and the horse that pulled the rig which was the source of their livelihood. I remember helping her walk their horse occasionally – a privilege, I thought, because it was a handsome animal. A calesa ride was five centavos, a fast and exciting race down main street behind a spirited animal, but since five centavos was all I had to live on everyday, I took the dike instead, saving my money for a slice of cake at recess.

It was a cool, damp walk in the morning on the dike, and if all one thought of was getting to school, you could reach the back f the Trade School Building in ten minutes, walk down the steps, cross Romulo Boulevard, and be in time for the flag ceremony. But there were diversions to see – life stirring in the dark interiors of the dike houses, breakfast being set, children hushed, a wife nagging, a husband scratching himself at the window, clothes hung out to dry flower pots watered, detours of the imagination that help the passerby and delayed him.

But the walk in the afternoon was the best part of all. We dragged our wooden clogs and our school bags, taking our time, my friends and I, thinking of home and supper. Along the dike the mothers called to their children; the houses

sprang alive with kerosene lamps. The smell of the river would come up to us, and we would look across it to the other bank, talking approaching summer, planning forays to melon patches.

On clear nights the river would glisten, one huge sheet of dark glass from our kitchen window. My friend has gone on to wealth and status, not too easily accessible to people these days, but I do enough remembering for the two of us. I suppose we weather everything – I have survived her success without envy, and my reminiscences must leave her untouched. Only the wall two high school girls had thought would last a hundred years has crumbled, a casualty of government neglect and shortsightedness. But my mind never lets go. The dike that the papers say has given way, stand stubbornly in my memory, a sweep of cement and sand, and the paucity in my children’s lives includes the absence of such memory of their lives.