unfinished houses

When I was growing up, we did not live in our own house. We lived in my grandparents' house, a grand affair in marble with three bedrooms, terraces front and back, heavy narra furniture, and huge cabinets filled with expensive china.

So where was our house? It was in an isolated little village where my parents' teaching posts were. In those days, you went to wherever the school superintendent sent you. They sent public school teachers to godforsaken places to spread education. We went there only during the summer, because my grandmother thought we were too good to live in a place with no electricity and the only source of entertainment at night was watching fireflies converge on trees.

For the child that I was, I thought our house in the little barrio was the grandest, but in all the summers I spent there, it was always a work in progress. In a place where most houses had walls of wood and roofs of thatched coconut fronds, ours had a stone foundation and concrete walls. It was also elevated, because it had a basement. The basement, my parents said, was going to be a family room. There would be a little library in it. Imagine!

My father had a fishpond in the front yard, but we all begged him to turn it into a swimming pool. There were fruit trees around the fish pond, and we had a tree house. Well, the river was just across the road, but how many kids could sit in their own tree house while fishing?

My mother loved plants and had an enviable collection of orchids. She also grew vegetables in over a dozen plots in the backyard. My father loved animals; he kept pets that weren't exactly ordinary. He had a couple of dozen geese, a family of turkey, and assorted birds. He had pigs in a pen, fighting cocks, and lots and lots of hens that chased children. At any given time he had three fierce hunting dogs, and when he told his friends that his dogs were trained to kill, we children looked at the drooling sonsabitches with respect. At one time he also kept a deer, a hornbill, and a hawk. He hunted; it was his dream to kill a wild boar single-handedly.

And we spent those summers in the not-quite-a-house, with rough timber all around and steel bars in the backyard, piles of hollow blocks and pails of nails. It was fun, like being at camp, like pretending you were Indians and you lived in the wilderness.

My parents saved a little, built a little. One summer we didn't have stairs; the next we had balusters. Maybe my parents looked at tile samples together, or talked to carpenters together to know if the basement walls could withstand seeping water.

But somewhere along the line something went wrong, and they stopped building. Perhaps they stopped loving. Who knows? Then they started to accept teaching assignments in other places, and they left the house. It was the start of their marriage's decline, although we kids were blissfully unaware of it.

My parents separated when I was twenty. My father died when I was thirty-two. The house stood there over years, slowly rotting. The steel bars in the basement rusted, and it was said that there lived large snakes. The bedrooms became the territory of a colony of bees. The large hardwood panels were brought to various neighbors' houses for safekeeping. Until when, they did not know. Maybe they're still there, or already a part of the furniture.

I don't like looking at unfinished houses. They look so much like unfinished stories. You see the beginnings of something good and wonderful, and you know that someone took the time and effort to start building it. It was planned, and there was love in it.

It was sad to look at that unfinished house. You see the beginning of a dream, but you will never know why the dream turned sour. You will never know the many stories that will be told inside the house, the meals to be shared, the laughter in the morning, the comic books on hot afternoons. You will never know if it will have walls in a shade called robin's egg blue, or if the library will have warm yellow light from wall lamps. You will never know if the orchids in the garden will be the envy of everyone, or if the father will run out of exotic pets to keep. You will never know if there will be visiting grandchildren in the summer, and how many of them will fight over the privilege of sitting in grandfather's knee. You will never know all that could be, in that house.

Unfinished house, unfinished love. It's all the same. Left untended and neglected, all it will be is an empty, sad ruin.