I’ve lived in a total of six houses.
When I was born in 1991, my parents lived in Taculing, Bacolod City, in my mum’s family’s compound, where my grandma and two bachelor uncles also lived. At that time, there were only two houses: my grandma’s old house, and my family’s little wooden house. I remember our floor was made out of bamboo, and there would be slits in between, and I would drop all sorts of random stuff in them: coins, coloring books, crayons, small toys, food. Later, when we had the wooden house torn down to make a new one, they would find tons of junk underneath, all dropped by yours truly. As a kid, I also had this nasty habit of drawing on our wooden walls and coating them with Vicks Vapor Rub to make them shinier. My parents saw that there was no way they could curb this passion of mine for drawing on walls, so my father decided to draw more stuff on them, since we were going to have a new house built anyway.
During the time when the new concrete house which would replace our little hut was being built, my family, composed of my parents, my younger sister and me, moved into one of the rooms in my grandma’s old house. I don’t remember much from this time, except that I thought it was really cool that I could watch TV (our old TV) in our room, and not in the sala.
When the new house was finally done, we moved back into it, making it my third house to have lived in. It was a nice, clean-looking house with pretty white concrete walls, worlds apart from our old hut covered with my crayon masterpieces. The sad thing was, I couldn’t drop stuff in between cracks on the floor anymore. We also had a small porch, where I placed a flowering makahiya I’d put in a pot.
A couple of years after that, my aunt in the States decided to have a new house built for their mum, my grandma, in the same compound. I was in elementary school then, and me, my sister, and the maid’s daughter would hang out at the construction site after the workers left late in the afternoon. We would pick up small polygonal wood bits and take them home, or put wood shavings in our hair and pretend we were little blonde children.
But before the new house was finished, my grandma died of complications from diabetes. She never got to live in it. When the house finally got done, my aunt didn’t want it to stay empty, so we moved into it. My two uncles stayed behind in the old house. It was a really nice house, with tiled floors and a veranda with pretty railings. The first floor was sort of like an open sala – it didn’t have walls — and the real house was upstairs. It was my fourth house.
We didn’t get to stay there for long, though. My father decided that the whole family would move to Victorias, where we could stay at a company house, and he could walk to work everyday. At first my sister and I were extremely pissed; if you check out our old house, there’s this small “I hate Victorias” etched into our bedroom door, just right above the doorknob.
Just this summer, we moved out and transferred to EB Magalona, which is just beside Victorias, and for the first time in my life I have my own room. And that makes a grand total of six houses. Some people get to stay in only one place their entire lives, but my family and I move around a lot, I guess. Haha.
