Remembering our dead is best done by living

Instead of going to the sementeryo to remember our Nanay Rosing, we take the 6-hour drive to her hometown in La Union (from Manila). We have been doing this for more than a decade.
It started when she have asked me to drive for her to visit her cousins months before she passed. She was already frail then. I have not been driving that long and the trip was my first long-drive. Aboard my not-so-old second-hand small, silver Honda City along with Mama and my youngest brother. I cannot remember in detail the trip but I do clearly remember staying in her cousin’s small old house.
It was very dark inside the house. It was very old and it creaked when you walk in the stairway. They had basic wooden furnitures – a sala set, a multi-purpose table with chairs used for dining and other activities, and maybe a small television. In their kitchen you’ll see a poso, a manual water pump, where they get their water used to wash the dishes, cook and bathe.
They didn’t have bedrooms but as guests we stayed in the second floor and slept on the wooden floor on a banig and clean sheets sharing a small electric fan. As a city girl in my first country trip, I knew better than to complain. In my mind I thought I was in a horror movie in a scene where an aswang was about to enter the house through the windows. The entire place was very quiet and we were asleep earlier than our usual city girl bedtime. Surprisingly, I remember having a very restful sleep that night.
Come morning we spent most of the day going around the neighborhood to meet my aunts and cousins. We even got to go to a tobacco farm, picked fruits from their trees, and walked through a shallow river to get to one house to another. Life was very simple.
We drove back to the city with a car trunk full of freshly picked fruits! From there on, we come back as often as we can. Each trip is our way to remember her.
