Memories of Summer

With two much older siblings, Chito found himself playing alone most of the time during his childhood days. A typical scene would be Chito staring at the image of his older brother Eddie's back disappearing in the distance as Eddie made his way in his bike out of the narrow esquinita fronting their house to join his buddies in some corner store a distance away from their house.

Chito then makes his way back to their house and sees his sister Tita who's about eight years his senior, playing girls stuff with a couple of other girls. He then goes up to the second floor of their house and finds his mom focused on ironing some clothes. He sees his father in the nearby chair fully absorbed in reading the papers.

Feeling a little dejected, Chito goes back down to the front yard and wanders about in the small neighborhood that lines a small river. A short distance away, he sees other boys congregating at the foot of an old Sampaloc tree. A smile breaks on his face and he rushes to join them.

He sees them playing with ants. One boy has a black ant at the tip of a stick while the other has a red ant on it. The boys squeal in delight as the combatant ants take each other in a fight for their life, at the tip of a narrow stick. The black ant is no match to the red ant.

Chito feels a little pity on the black ant but joins the rest of the boys anyway when they scoop out a bunch of red ants from their colony nearby and dump them right in front of the black ants' colony at the foot of the Sampaloc tree. What follows is a grand battle of the ants that excites the boys, including Chito, no end.

Later Chito joins them when they climb the Sampaloc tree and helped themselves to the young Sampaloc fruits, enjoying their sourness and all.

Ah! Summer!

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(The photo below is a present-time post-processed photo taken in front of our house, of a girl on a bike being followed by her brother. I took this photo a couple of days ago while I was enjoying a breezy afternoon under the Macopa tree in our front yard. The scene triggered memories of my own summer days as a kid in our neighborhood back in my hometown many many years ago).