PENnED

By Ed Fernandez

I don’t know when this sad feeling began gnawing deep within my old yet still conscientious soul. I just know that it was long after I made that stroll in a new-found little forest of tall trees that wasn’t there before. In the farm that then already brought joy to a child’s heart of mine, I was now pleasantly surprised that after more than a decade a green paradise had sprung up and given a reason for my twenty-something heart to smile a grand.

It was in the late 80s when I last went back to our family farm and walked into a glade in the middle of giant trees for the first and, sadly, last time. The little forest that apparently thrived on the upper level of our land, just above where the edge of the unruly Allah River used to flow—before it left a huge swamp between our land and the river when it left to follow its new path—drew me, like magnet, to go under its shady canopy on that unforgettable hot summer day.

As I entered the coolness beneath the towering trees in what I first thought was just a plant kingdom, I looked up as I heard a cacophony of bird sounds. Behold, a big family of beautiful parrots dressed in bright red and green! My eyes feasted on that beautiful sight until my neck was too stiff to continue looking up and watching and enjoying the free show of the winged actors on the stage of branches and twigs against a backdrop of verdant leaves and a cloud-dotted blue sky high above.

I don’t remember telling anyone about it—not even my brother and his family who lived there, and definitely not his son who, like any child in rural Sultan Kudarat, knew how to skillfully use a good homemade slingshot. Perhaps that’s because my heart told me it was just our little secret. And perhaps because I knew that for some hungry Filipinos a beautiful parrot, even if it can talk like you do, can be turned into a special Adobo!

Many years have passed and now I live far away across the Pacific Ocean where one can just forget everything he’s left behind. But how can I? How can I forget a place that brings very happy memories of my childhood? Dipping my overheating energetic small and hairless body beside our big farm carabao’s hairy and bulky one in the cool and limpid pool surrounded by tall reeds where I imagined schools of tiny Haluans swam away from us and hid with their dads and moms, for instance, was a paradisiacal experience for myself as a child. There were many other wonderful memories. But a memory that brings both joy and sadness to my heart is about that little forest and the parrots that sheltered and lived in it. Devoid of sorrow, they sang and played like there was no tomorrow!

Indeed, there was no tomorrow for them there in our farm. Their fate was sealed by an arbitrary human decision that favored humans. Or did it? The lady whose family bought a portion of our land told me the little green forest was now gone! The tall trees were cut down and the timbers were carried away somewhere across the river to build the home of some guy’s family and then some.

It’s quite sad the little green forest is now gone. And it’s even more sad that the family of beautiful parrots or their descendants are also gone. Their home, the little green forest, was destroyed. Poor little parrots! Where are they now? Have they survived?

Why can’t we, humans, just build homes but not at the expense of the little parrots?