Alatiris—

“Dito kami dati namimitas...”

An alatiris tree stands vivid in Jemima Yabes’s memory. Its branches are heavy, ripe with fruit, cherry red dimpling the green and yellow leaves, against the blue of the sky. She remembers how she and her sister would climb her lola’s roof to pick from it, in a time where their only worries were how to find the next foothold without falling. The sun was bright but not piercing, and the afternoon stretched long. The tree stands large in her memory; it’s a landmark, a character upon which other memories are anchored. Climbing it every visit turned into an unspoken tradition. With a single image, tastes, textures, smell, and color come back alive.

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Bougainvillea—

“Dito kami dati naglalaro…”

The bougainvillea is everywhere in UP Campus where Yabes grew up. It cast its silhouette upon the sidewalks, and colored and draped the trees and fences with its flowers. It found its way to the neighborhood kids’ play and featured in their bahay-bahayan, perhaps as an ingredient for a potion, a play soup, the decor of a makeshift living room. In its abundance, it influenced the stories that could be told. Leaves sprout and are replaced and flowers wither, commonplace and ephemeral. But the plant itself holds permanence, its presence hard to eradicate. They predate the people of a place, existing before and long after.

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But as years pass a landscape transforms, gradual, unnoticed, until familiar places can no longer be grasped. The alatiris was unceremoniously cut to make room for an expansion of the house. Yabes looks for a picture of the old tree but finds she doesn’t have one. In contrast, things one used to hold dear are outgrown as the eyes that view it also change. The bougainvillea, when she moved away from the campus, was left behind, rooted in a particular place and time. Coming back for visits, she finds that it has ceased to hold the same meanings; it has returned to simply being the flora of the land, swept off the streets in the mornings, reminding of a childhood past. Nostalgia can exist only in transformation; it exists in moving away from what used to be.

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Another picture: playmates crowd around a kitchen table, a variety of leaves and flowers gathered at the center, along with paper and coloring materials. Each is busy shading their page, pressing it over a leaf, applying pressure with a pencil, repeating the process with the next. Recall the wonder at seeing each crease transfer onto the sheet, a record of an individual leaf that would have otherwise returned back to the earth, unremembered. The process mirrors how small gestures, habits, and play of childhood are pressed upon our memories, things that are apparently insignificant but lasting.

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This act of collecting, preserving, and remembering resists losing what is dear to rapid change. It centers an affection and longing for the past not as regression, but as an act of treasuring the small things that shaped one’s current self. It honors the perspective of the child. The fruit is larger than life when one is small, looking up toward familiar branches.

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—Shireen Co

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