The houses here were built upon land that used to be swamps and marshes and growing orchards of apples and oranges that no longer exist as part of each backyard. The main road of S!e#rr@ Rd.’ used to be quiet long before they opened up the dead end piles of dirt now noisy with the busy railway intersection at L^ndy Rd.
Not a dull moment could ever become of our backyard. Yesterday’s overcast and high winds blew across the foot tall lawn as the green blades bends across as if being petted by a large invisible hand. There is much cleaning up of native plants and weed and of eucalyptus leaves dried up on the ground everywhere to be done by Paw when springtime permits warm weather.
This little plot of paradise garden has been maintained mostly by Paw and he seems at peace with his surrounding. He is a quite man, who was born on May 3 and does have this down to earth Taurus patience of digging deep into ground and soil, including his obsessive compulsive to get the rubbish separated nicely from the recyclables.
He may take longer than most people to accomplish the maintenance but that is fine for him as long as the job is done right and perfectly the way he wants. So that the fruits of his hard labor could be harvested later on with the fruit trees bearing pomelo, apricot, nectarines, plums, lemons, pears and persimmons. The backyard is his territory.
Whenever we have too much fruits, we share what bountiful harvest with bio-units and friends. Some appreciate the kind gestures; others are meant to be ignored and left in the gutter like some forgotten walnut. All our relatives living in the East Bay are a bunch of ungrateful people. After leaving a bagful of fruits at each door on a fine day, one would think that a simple thank you to my bio-units, at least, would suffice.
But we know they are too busy to care because they are working sixteen hours to pay off their egos. I shouldn’t sound so bitter but I did and had to drive with Maws pleadings to deliver these bags of fruits. Her logic, according to her mother, is to treat the relatives of the in-laws nicely.
We try to make her understand that this was not her destiny to be treated nicely in return from my own cold-hearted kin folks, whose remind me of a bunch of angry, hissing nagas.
(He-he: I don’t know much about my bloodline or ancestry but this is as close a description I could think of to explain very territorial attitudes of people from a province in Philippines called Batangas on Paw side).
I remember as a child looking at a particular photo of a completely white snake appearing from the page of our old Encyclopaedia. Each look at the snake’s head popping out gave me heart jolting fears that I had to cross train myself to view the photo longer and eventually to touch the photo.
Now I know better that snakes are part of the grand design. We don’t have snakes in the backyard but there used to be crickets making noise into the night now paved over with cement, monarch caterpillars eating the milkweed that used to grow in the backyard, gophers digging large holes through our lawn, hoards of flies buzzing into spider webs and a big toad that hopped away never to be seen again.
Times have indeed changed in lifestyles, attitudes and people that I’ve met along the way. I know that someday, people would all be nicer and stop being a bunch of hard headed nuts. People should learn to enjoy their own backyard like Paw, who happens to like walking outdoors. He’d pace back and forth while bundled up in two layers of jacket with one hooded and a baseball cap to finish the image of a toasty chestnut.
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Saturday April 1, 2006 – 11:12pm (PST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
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