Hardin ni Nanay (My Mother's Garden)

In a small place we live, where it doesn’t have space to walk around and do other activities with privacy outside the door, the best area we could wander off is, on top of the roof. As they say, anything over and under your property line is yours, well that could be a huge amount of space. But make no mistake, there’s a limitation to it though.

Generally, most of the houses here have corrugated roof and so they can’t do much on their supposed space aside from those kids  who sometimes can be seen during kite flying season, However, my mother had it converted into slabs and utilize it as her garden and exercise area. Well, when you are gardening you are exercising as well so that’s a bonus activity. The good things about it? The room below the garden is not that hot anymore especially during noontime and the converted place is refreshing and cool that you want to stay there until late afternoon. Not advisable to stay at night though as you will be feasted with mosquitoes.

Here are some photos from my mother’s garden at the roof.

Not only flowers can be seen in her garden, there are some herbs and vines, too.

At one point, there were also some veges like bitter gourd, okra (lady’s fingers), mustard and pechay (pakchoi or bokchoi). I guess my mother can’t handle them all anymore. Going up and down for her can be tiring nowadays.

Some more photos during our stay here last Holy Week.

And by the way, today my mother just added another year into her life. So I would like to take this opportunity to greet her and tel her how much we, the siblings, appreciate and thankful for all the love, hard work and discipline that she and my late father exerted in raising us. We may be away from you but we try to and keep on trying to be near to you as much as possible and in every way we can do.

Happy Birthday Nay…  I love you very much…