Leaves Over Water

As harvest time looms, I’ve been
going back and forth to Quezon almost every weekend now, checking up on the
status of the stockroom I’m having built, buying more building materials,
paying off the two workers. 

Never have I wished this badly to
drag the remaining months to their end. Never have I had a year strung like
this on a single thread of story, the story of building an actual rice field,
with all the months of planning and prayer to look back on. I can’t wait to
continue the story on to the next and much bigger plot of land, a
four-and-a-half hectare piece just itching to be developed, just a kilometer or
two away from the rice field.

One can’t really blame me if,
whenever I get back to the city, I feel sluggish and wistful, wanting so much to
go back there. There, your problems are nature-related: how the harvest will
turn up, how much the coconuts are going to produce kopra, how the weather will be, who’s going to be assigned to chop
the wood, cut the grass, make the clearing, take up some land issue with the
baranggay kapitan, and all that.

My mind can spin round and round
these tasks and try to come up with solutions and make financial calculations
to get them done and never get tired. In a way, this must be how it feels to
manage your own business: put in 110% of effort and enjoy it because it all
rebounds to your benefit. In contrast, I put in 100% of effort to my work as a
creative agency personnel and I get so beat up at the end of the day (or even
earlier). There are clients to attend to, write-ups to do, meetings and endless
discussions – all artificial problems that we manufacture in the name of
corporate survival.

Sure, it pays the bills, so I’m
grateful. But once the farm is fully in place and producing enough (and by
“farm” I’m talking not just about the ricefield, but all the pieces of
properties I’m trying to fit together), I hope to be done with my job. I’m
inspired by Pam’s assertion that she will retire at age 50. I can’t say anymore
that’s still a long way off – it’s just around the bend of 40, the ultimate
middle age we’ll reach in 3 years’ time. That’s why I’m buckling myself down to
business – this farming business – if only to give her and all of us a
beautiful, productive hideaway in the province.

The stockroom may look claptrap for
now, but by the end of next week, it would be done – just in time for harvest
– my first significant step to reclaiming a long-neglected birthright.