Leaves Over Water

Life moves fast, life alters in the span of a few weeks, a few months. Half a year ago, I had no idea that building a rice paddy – actually turning into a farmer, for that matter — would consume me.

Sometime
in 2006, I had set my sights on developing something like a fruit farm in five
years or so. Pam and I even talked about how the year 2011 carried a certain mystique,
because of a confluence of events (she’d finish off the car loan; I’d be able
to cash in on my pension plan and start preparing our properties in Quezon).
Mine were hazy plans, and only the cement posts I had commissioned a worker to
build and erect around one property were cast in concrete, literally and
figuratively.

When my tita and I went last March to oversee the laying of these
posts (and attend a clan reunion), we were astounded to learn that the aqueduct
for irrigation running along the side of the rice paddies and the road has finally been fixed and channeling water already. For ten years or so, that irrigation
trough had been abandoned by the local government, drying up hopes for the
paddies on both sides of the road. It’s been fixed for a year now and in fact
we came at a golden harvest time and received a lot of greetings from farmers
offering to work our land.

Plans were laid down fast and I prayed for signs
that would tell me if this was meant to be. As it happened, they were already
around me:

Financial blessings in the form of lucrative writing jobs on the
side came as early as February; and the windfall is coming in already.

My other
aunt, Tita Alice, alerted us about the presence of a new worker who settled
temporarily in her property, looking for work.

Then the nationwide rice
shortage crisis exploded around March—laughably incidental it may seem, but I take
it as a higher calling, seriously.

I stressed over these, I crammed my mind
with new knowledge about rice measurements like cavans , balde, calculated prices of binhi,
learned about certain workers’ rights under Agrarian Reform, about pilapil and how long it would take and
the going rates to till using a carabao or a handheld tractor. Rene, whom I
have already hired, reports from time to time about the progress of work, and
now we’re moving inevitably towards rice planting time.

I pray it progresses
with care and certainty. Many positive developments are also happening in the province of Mauban as a whole. The road to it is
100% paved, and I expect a lot of inheritors that have settled in Manila to turn back again and
dream, like me. Mayor Bantayan, who is of Pastrana descent and is a second
cousin (his mom and my tita were first cousins) is aggressively pushing for
many infrastructure developments after winning over a long-time family rival in
the last elections.

It’s an exciting time, an exciting life that I look forward
to sharing with Pam, my kids, my in-laws, my Tita most of all, and yes, my
brother, despite his seeming lack of interest in this project. I hope the profits of this rice paddy will cascade to help develop the other projects I
envision for our other properties.

Thanks to these circumstances, it might not take
five years after all before we taste the fruits of the land. May the spirits of
our ancestors, to whom I owe it all, guide us to where we have long wanted to
go.

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