With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
'cause of you"
-Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
I'm on a 30-day vacation. Just like in my previous one, I'll be staying in our Playpen. That's how my wife and two daughters endearingly call our two-bedroom bungalow in low-cost housing subdivision in San Rafael, Mexico. To the unfamiliar, they might mistake the place to be part of Bulaon, City of San Fernando as it lies near the Bulaon Resettlement Complex where the Mount Pinatubo eruption and subsequent lahar flows survivors had been resettled since 1996, including my parents and family.
It's certainly a very, very fine house and not just with two but more cats depending on the time of the day. The Playpen appears to be favorite haunt of the neighborhood cats, which we feed with whatever leftover food we have -- that is, if we have any. Surely, it's not the food that these felines are after but, probably, the solace that the Playpen offers.
Naturally, it does not have the amenities that I've seen in TV footage of the various residences of the controversial alleged mastermind of the Php10-billion pork barrel scam now trying to escape the long, but snail-paced, arm of the law. From what I've read, she and her family were most likely living in a similar, maybe a bit better, abode before she finally hit it big time and hogged the prime time news as a result of her highly publicized scheme that purportedly fleeced the poor and marginalized rural people of vital resources that would have eased their sufferings from their age-old societal woes.
But these amenities were not what made the Playpen such a very, very fine house. Actually, the longer we spend time in it, the more sub-standard we find it. With the rains, more leaks and other sub-standards are being discovered. The developers, of course, cannot attribute their lousy and bungled works to their project being low cost. It's incompetence and more -- greed maybe. But these physical flaws failed to unmake the Playpen.
Life, of course, has never been hard here right from the start. As soon as we're home, we all feel relaxed as we're relieved from all the stress from where we came. Stress is practically everywhere in this time and age. That's how my wife feels after a hard day's work in her school, as well as our elder daughter every time she's home from her job as a medical sales representative in Makati City. Possibly, that's how our younger daughter, who just started as a trainee in a major TV network, feels, too.
The Playpen is more than this to me, though. When my mom was still alive, the hour or two that I'd spent here were always what I needed to get rid of all my stress and regained the energy necessary to continue with my care giving chores to her and my dad. All those years that she's been confined to her bed and her wheel chair, I would seek special solace in the Playpen. All I have to do is ride my old reliable mountain bike from my parents' house to get here, stay a couple of hours, at the most, while they're having their afternoon nap and, pronto, I'm recharged. Even after my mom's death, I still go through the same ritual even if it's only my dad that I now looked after.
During these 30 days, or, should I say, 23 days to be exact, I'll be practically house-keeping for my wife. In between house chores and while waiting for her arrival from her school, you'll most likely see me sitting in the garden, tinkering the hand-me-down netbook from my younger daughter as I try to compose my blogs and read online news. It's also possible; you'll find me sipping my favorite Batangas brew no matter what the weather and the time of the day is.
At the end of my break, I'm hoping that I'll not only be recharged to continue with care giving chores and up my blog output but, more importantly, has savored a more normal family life with my wife and grown up daughters. This, to me, is certainly the best thing in life that's truly free -- priceless, too. And, it can only be experienced while I'm at the Playpen. (30)
