In the heart of Tacurong, where the sun pressed close and the streets carried both dust and laughter, stood our house. My father, who thought like an architect even when he called himself only a teacher of patience, designed it so that a gigantic caimito tree at its center would not be cut down but honored. It stood tall and independent, like a grotto in the middle of the home. It was a silent guardian that watched over us without blinking. Around them, my father built a low encasement. Above them he left the roof open to the sky, so the branches could thrust upward without shame, drinking both light and rain as if the house itself were only their guest.
In the mornings, the leaves cast shifting patterns on the walls and tables. Light came not in straight lines but in broken fragments, scattering over our bowls and faces as though the day arrived in pieces. By afternoon, the green gave way to gold, and the rooms filled with a softer, more hesitant glow. We grew used to it, as if all homes were meant to breathe with trees. Our mornings followed a rhythm that was never only our own. Coffee simmered in the kitchen, its steam rising in thin curls. Champorado thickened in pots, sweet and dark, while baskets of pan de sal waited to be torn open. My mother placed queseo on the table—goat’s cheese wrapped in banana leaves. She loved their tangy, pungent goodness. We ate slowly, sometimes in silence, sometimes with laughter, while outside the roosters announced the day as if it belonged to them.
But even as we sat together, people were already passing through: friends, neighbors, strangers. My father, who carried the burdens of local politics like an invisible satchel, received those who came for help, advice, or consolation. Men with worn shoes and women with calloused hands stepped into the light of the trees to speak their troubles, trusting his listening more than his words. Some swore the trees themselves leaned closer when a man confessed a debt he could not pay, or when a mother whispered her son’s mistakes. Others said the leaves rustled with approval whenever my father promised help, as if the guardians gave blessing to his decisions. On rare mornings, when sorrow was too heavy, a single leaf would fall silently into the lap of the supplicant—taken not as accident, but as a sign that even grief had been noticed and stored away.
My mother, her clinic only a few meters from the house, would rise from the table to see patients waiting with coughs, fevers, and private sorrows. The porch was often crowded, a living antechamber where people clutched bottles of homemade remedies or rosaries worn smooth with prayer. Many believed her hands carried more than medicine. Some said the birds that followed her in her garden also perched near the clinic windows, singing softly so the sick would not fear their turn. And more than once, patients claimed their pain had already begun to lift before she spoke a word—eased, perhaps, by the calm that pooled in the shade of the trees.
But in that house, the ordinary was never only ordinary. My younger brother would vanish without a sound, leaving the whole family to search in a frenzy, pulling open cabinets, looking under beds, calling his name into the yard. Hours later, we would find him curled like a cat at the base of the tree, asleep, the roots cradling him as though they had grown for that very purpose. My mother, walking through her tiny garden in the cool of the morning, would be joined by birds that seemed to arrive only for her. They perched on the branches, singing low songs until she finished her rounds, as if the garden itself had hired them as her musicians. And sometimes—no one ever saw how or why—rolled bills would appear neatly on her dressing table, small gifts placed in silence, as though the house itself paid tribute to her patience. Yet beneath these wonders, a deeper quiet lingered. At night, the trees creaked though the air was still. The floor trembled faintly, as if the roots were shifting in their sleep. Some said trees remembered everything they had ever seen. Ours seemed to remember more—our brother’s laughter, our mother’s songs, our father’s stubborn sketches and the whispered confessions of strangers. Their murmurs passed through the branches at dusk, not frightening, only insistent, as if reminding us that our lives had been grafted into theirs.
The house was no mansion, but it contained a world: food and fragrance, silence and laughter, vanishing children and faithful birds, money that appeared like blessings, a tree that bore not only leaves but memory, and a quiet court where the poor and sick left their burdens among the roots. Now, the house no longer stands. The tree, which had lived like sentinel in its heart, withered when we moved away. It was cut down at last, its roots brittle, its leaves no longer reaching for the light. It was as if its breath had been bound to the life of the household: our mornings of coffee and laughter, our father’s counsel, our mother’s healing touch, our brother’s secret naps in the shadows. When those days ended, the trees too surrendered, and with their fall, the house gave back its place to silence.
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