Summer




Adding to the ten billion other posts on summer ever recorded, described, painted, and posted anywhere - summer is, at least in the corner of the universe I call my own -
























travelling home to Baguio and going on a hike, assured that you will be legitimately going on a nature-embracing frolic and coming back out of it a dirtier, albeit a better, man -



- and finding beautiful tugs of war between biology, architecture and gravity.

While in Baguio, summer is also going back to the coffee shops tucked here and there, happily charging midway between exorbitant and acceptable prices for food and drink (which no amount of editing in Picasa will render any more scrumptuous) -






- blueberry pancakes that are really blue,














and chrysanthemum tea served in paraphernalia so pretty-looking it made me forget to wonder why I ordered tea made of drowned flowers.







Summer is also the time of birthdays -





- my mother's 72nd, with some of my family -
























- and my nephew's, with his graduation party, which required me to grow extremely unfamiliar skills in throwing catching eggs.

We came in second place. I underthrew the egg.


Summer is also taking a time off from the travelling by travelling to places -








- places with water you can swim in without drowning -









- and other places with water you can swim in without not drowning - (funny, the first and only time I drowned was in a pool) -








- or at least drowning in one other, presumably more pleasant, sense, which does not involve water.








And, most significant of all, summer is, regardless - and because - of the moving around it involves, when you come back to wherever it is you consider your home, and hold on to the things that matter, and remember.  Summer reminds me, as in Pratchett, that a vacation requires you to come back home and have a place to remember things from -



- even when it involves going to look at a volcano on the way back, and being enchanted by the surprise that you are also part of someone else's summer.

Comments

  1. glentot10 June 2013 at 23:52

    Summer, for me, is forcing myself out of bed and into the cold Baguio morning, taking a quick shower, running, climbing two steps at a time to make it to my 7:30 AM class. Summer means friends being away on vacation and me being left with fellow students trying to graduate on time, talking about things we don't have in common and basically just trying to subsist in dim corridors, waiting for the next class to start. Summer is going back to my cold bed and waiting for sleep, knowing that the next day is going to be just the same. Now all of it is just a memory, but it's one memory I like to revisit during this time of the year.

    One summer I was walking along Session Road and you ran out of Volante in the middle of your meal and greeted me. I was so speechless as you spoke, mainly because I kept thinking Oh my God here's my Philisophy instructor, and here I am in shorts and slippers. You probably don't remember this :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris Ramoya12 June 2013 at 00:38

    Er. I don't. Haha. Good hearing from you again, Mr Tabarejos. :)

    ReplyDelete

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