02.22.07 kulturnatib

The last tree standing

Labangon is one of the biggest barangays in Cebu City. That is also where our ancestral house is. Before I was born there was an even older, more ancestral house; a Spanish style house complete with an azotea. But that was torn down to make way for modernity; an American-style two-level house complete with a basement and a hole on the roof to accommodate a palm tree.

This was the house, that is still there now sans the palm tree, that I was born into. Yet, much older than both houses there were the trees, the fruit trees.

Last week, taking my mother back from lunch, I noticed that the last of those trees is finally dead. The remains are still there, but they are more a menace now, its branches liable to break in strong winds and fall on somebody's head or vehicle.

It surprised, even shocked me. It seemed like it wasn't that long ago when I noticed that it was still bearing fruit. But, nobody took the trouble anymore to gather these, not just because it was no longer safe to scamper up the already brittle branches, but mostly because the people living there were no longer interested in fruits, especially those that you gather yourself.

These people were the generation that came after us. They are the children of my siblings who still live in the compound in houses that trees had to make way for: Four big caimito or star apple trees, a guava tree, an atis tree, before a typhoon knocked it down, a tisa tree, and the tree that outlived them all, the tambis tree.

These trees were as much a part of our childhood as, particularly, the tambis tree was no longer a meaningful part in my nieces and nephews growing up, especially those who lived right next to it.

For us a game of tag was not just a simple matter of running and outrunning but a question of climbing and outclimbing. The trees whose branches were connected to each other by their proximity to each other and to the roof of the house making them somehow all connected were all one long extension of our playground.

Yet, more than making our games as challenging as it was enjoyable, they provided us with fruits. Their flowering clued us on to the approach of summer, to the end of school. By the time the fruits were ripening, we would be packing our school bags for summer storage.

The insane idea that children are supposed to be early Einsteins and have to be in some kind of school all-year round was unheard of in our time. Summer was for children, for playing, for eating fruit right there up on the branches as you pick them or at the dining table when you had a salad of chilled caimito with milk.

Aside from fruits, trees provided for medicine as well. The young guava leaf was best for chewing after a milk tooth had to be extracted or had fallen out as they often do. The atis leaf was also useful for treating minor aches. The caimito leaf was also treatment for something I no longer remember.

Of course, trees had their hazards. A cousin had the worse of it. He fell from one of the caimito trees. He tried to cushion his fall with his hand. But the fall broke his wrist instead. The wrist bone protruded right through his young flesh.

My worse brush with arboreal agony was with the hairy caterpillar, the til-as, that was part and parcel of the package of the tambis tree. These creatures cause the worst itch in the world. And how it liked to be scratched! Because, doing so only spreads the itch wider, often, to all the nooks and cranny of the body.

But they were a minor inconvenience compared to the joy of biting into a tree full of red, sweet, juicy tambis. Besides, a session at the shower took care of the itchiness which one needed anyway with the heat and clamminess of summer.

Now, the tambis tree is dead. Killed, by too much concrete, loneliness, not being appreciated enough, by being practically being left for dead.

It is now a headstone for our generation: Born – Sometime, Died – In No Time.