Hereditary Childhood
If we had a good childhood, we want our children to have the childhood we had. As children, Mom would tell us about the huge lawn they had as kids and what fun they had running around and playing outside, and how she wished we had a lawn too. We didn't have a lawn but we had a garden, which was full of trees, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. My brothers and I used to spend hours there, playing on the swings, making magic potions, and digging up treasure. Nature was a big part of our childhood. We encountered spiders, big lizards (tuko), and the occassional snake (always a thrill) in our secret garden-backyard. We played in the mud in the summer rain. We discovered how flowers turned to fruit. We found rotten fruit that grew into seedlings. We ate fruit and vegetables from our garden.
Which is why, when we were still living in Makati and Parañaque, I sorely missed having a garden for my children. In both places our homes went all the way to the edges of the lot, and tiny plants in pots were not the same. One of my most favorite things about having moved out of the city is how we are now surrounded by greens and nature. Not quite so wild as what we had in our childhood (lots of insects, zero snakes), and not all of it is exactly ours (we plant in neighboring empty lots), but nature is nature and I believe my kids are reaping the benefits.
Back in June we bought some seeds and I assigned them little flower beds they could plant in. Desi and Ramon sometimes visit, but most afternoons I get home to find Lia weeding her little plot. It looks like this now.
It also helps that my helpers LOVE to garden! All i bought was a packet of Zinnia seeds. But they bring home little seedlings and plants from their own homes, or ask the village gardeners for clippings, and voila! Our home looks so happy with all the flowers!
Not to mention the vegetables they've planted over the last months. The kids find it more exciting to eat veggies when they know they've watered and helped harvest. We've had tomatoes, okra, string beans, and eggplants just to name a few. I love having gabi in my sinigang, knowing it was dug up from my land, just like when I was a kid in Katipunan.
We may never recapture the magic of our childhood when my Lolo Fel used to tend to his cacao trees. It was a year-long process of first smoking them, and soon we would find the little green pods growing out of the trunk where the flowers used to be. Lolo would harvest them when they are big, golden yellow, then dry the seeds in the sun for weeks. He would keep them, grind them with peanuts, store them again, until finally, come Christmas, Lola Yayang would cook it ina huge pot and we would drink hot chocolate from cacao that came from our back yard. We had fresh coconut juice from the tree. And anticipated star apples every Jan-Feb. My kids may not have the garden we used to have, but my daughter waters her flowers everyday. We will make our own magic here.
