Sentimental Journey 2 MOTHER’S PLAYGROUND IN TULARUCAN, JANIUAY

By Manny Piñol

Janiuay, Iloilo – Retired teacher Nelly Sudario Armada, 76, of Tularucan, Janiuay town in Iloilo pointed to me and my brother, Mayor Lito Piñol, the place where my mother was born and grew up as a child.

Tularucan was our first destination in what Mayor Lito and I called a Sentimental Journey back to the places where our parents were born which started at noon on Saturday in Iloilo City.

Our father, Bernardo Magbanua Piñol, was born in Liboo, Dingle town and our mother, Efigenia Colloquio Fantin, in Tularucan.

Both were public school teachers who met in Barangay Lika in M’lang, fell in love and married raising 11 boys.

We dropped by the historic Janiuay Cemetery on the way to Tularucan hoping that we would read names our mother used to mention to us when we were young.

Indeed, there were the familiar family names.

Teacher Nelly is 10 years younger than our mother but she knew our mother as a young girl.

“Your mother was very beautiful when she was young. She had long and curly hair and she was a happy spirit. She was a friend to everybody in the barangay,” said Teacher Nelly.

Her movement now limited because of athritis, Teacher Nelly pointed the place where our mother was born just across the highway going to Pototan.

The place is now owned by the family of our distant cousin, Cyril Defensor.

The house where she used to live was no longer there but the two giant mango trees which are over a century old still stood high and mighty.

I stood under the old mango trees yesterday shortly after I and Mayor Lito arrived in Tularucan and imagined my mother as a child playing with her friends under the trees.

Maybe, my mother and her friends used to climb these trees to pick the fruits.

Today, both trees are so tall I can’t even imagine how the new owner of the lot, Rodolfo Biogos, would be able to harvest the fruits.

There was a strange vibration as I touched the trunks of the mango trees.

It was a beautiful feeling imagining how my mother, her long curly hair flying with the wind, played with her friends running around the mango trees.

Somehow, it felt like I was in a time machine which brought me back to the past.

(Photos caption: The century old mango trees under whose shade our mother played as a child; the entrance to the centuries old Janiuay cemetery and the cemetery chapel; Nanay’s relative Belen Defensor and teacher Nelly Sudario Armada. Photos by Roselyn Padillo and Romirose Boloron. an old and faded photo of Nanay as a young student of the Iloilo City High Schoo.)