Acacia trees from the second-story window of my father's house in La Paz

My father's house on Burgos Street was two stories. We lived on the first floor which was elevated from the termite-infested ground by cement piers that ran around the whole structure, occasionally pierced by circular openings into which our poor female cat, Basura (garbage) disappeared when her uterus prolapsed. For days we heard her agonizing cries until she died. We couldn't get in to get her and even if we could we would not have been able to help her short of killing her and ending her agony. Vets were not part of Philippine life back then. Many Filipinos could not afford to take themselves to doctors when they got sick. They might consult an herbolario but usually would wait for the illness to run its course.

The Sumalapaos rented the second floor. My older sister, Merma, and I would visit the daughters, especially, the eldest, Ninon, who encouraged us to write pen pal letters to people around the world. She also encouraged me to start a stamp collection. For several years I collected the stamps from my pen pals' letters and also bought stamps on consignment from a philatelic shop in Manila. By the time I left Iloilo for Manila and medical school, I had stopped working on my stamp collection. I had several albums by then, displayed using Dennison stickers to lined black pages I bought from China Arts  on J. M. Basa Street downtown. I kept the albums in a secret compartment under the bottom shelf of my wardrobe and forgot about it. I had stamps from the Commonwealth era and I think the oldest stamp issued in the Philippines. After my father died, my mother razed the house down and built the house of her dreams. My younger sister told me they stored the furniture and other stuff from the house in a storage room next to where my father's oldest brother, Tatay José, lived. José was reputedly quite the man about town when he was younger. He had many lady friends and I think he also owned a car when cars became available in the country. By the time I knew him he was old and eked a slim living by "inventing" contraptions like a water heater that he sold to his brothers and other strangers he could talk into parting from a few pesos in their pocket.

I remembered best the view from the second-floor windows of the Sumalapao family. Both the living room and the adjoining dining room had big windows facing the yard on the side of the house. In front of the yard was the biggest acacia tree I have ever seen. Three men could link arms to go around its trunk. It was said that Japanese soldiers were buried underneath it. Its leafy canopy merged with a slightly smaller acacia that grew on the side yard and whose branches spread over the shed covering the calesas my father owned and ran as a side business. From the second-floor windows all I could see were leafy branches of the acacia trees with the pink-and-white flowers and dangling, chocolate-brown pods. I don't know when I decided I would one day live on the second floor that was denied us when we were children. I do now live on the second floor of a condominium. Every year the ash outside the living room grows bigger. From my deck I could hardly see the lake any more but the leafy boughs do provide privacy from my neighbors, maybe a poor recompense for the loss of the lake view. But what I really love is the view of green boughs when I look out my window.

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