Tag-Ulan

There was this scene in an American Dad episode where Stan instantaneously sombers as soon as he sees the first snowflake of winter, as memories of past winters come back to haunt him. I had a nostalgia attack yesterday. The weather was grey, cool and gloomy. Every hour, the heavens deemed it necessary to dampen the city. I love looking out windows and yesterday was no exception. I was gazing down at a colorful Gawad Kalinga settlement far below my 10th floor window and I saw children playing in the rain at the top of their multi-purpose hall. The hall has an uncovered penthouse with green and white tiles gaily forming a geometric mosaic. Balusters line the sides and a cement staircase leads to this unassuming place. The tiles were wet and slippery but the kids loved it that way. They used their bare torsos and the slippery tiles to launch themselves from one wall to another and laughing hysterically.

Back in M.H. del Pilar street, our house sat adjacent to a Barangay hall with a large concrete plaza in front and a proud central flagpole. Whenever it rains, my parents would never permit us to play outside and bathe in the rain, so my sisters and I did the next best thing. Watch. We would station ourselves in our vast terrace facing the Barangay hall, and watch the other neighborhood kids frolic in the rain. They love standing below a severed gutter pipe on the side of my father's 100-foot building (I am exaggerating, it was about 30 feet) beside our house and let the cascade from the building's roof beat upon their heads. Sometimes they would fight over the spot but most times they patiently wait their turn. I remember reading in my encyclopedia that kids in Hawaii use large Ti leaves (still don't know what plant they came from) to slide down a muddy hill, which I thought then was very dangerous and very, very exciting. The kids in my street didn't need Ti leaves or mud or a hill to do that. They slipped and slid on the concrete plaza in front of my house with just their bare chests and water from the heavens while my sisters and I enviously watched from between the intricate pillars of our lavish verandah.