Melinda J. Irvine

There is a time of year here after the rains come and the wind gets cooler. Times when you (if you owned a jumper) you would wear it. Instead, you sit in the morning cool with socks on your feet and two towels dabbled around your shoulder.

In the morning, the water from the tanks runs cold over your fingers and you fill the bucket to about 3/4 — leaving some room for the hot water (you will boil this in the kettle usually reserved for tea water). Then take a bath.

Nothing looks terribly different (apart from the overcast days and days and days) or maybe it does? The harvested rice and sugar cane fields are stripped and being ploughed by water buffalo and tiny men in shredded clothes. I wonder how they feel about cold? Out there in the third consecutive day of pouring rain, behind a harnessed carabao in heavy mud? The whole day too, and not just for the five or six seconds that I see while the bus goes past.

When he arrives home does he strip off all that wet, sodden, torn, clothing and bathe from a well? Or under a bamboo-fashioned drain pipe? Does his wife or daughter boil some water in a rice pot which he mixes in a bucket and allows it to fall over his wet, wrinkled skin? Or does he just get on with it? Warming himself rather, with a bottle of dark spirits washed down with loud music and the chatter of neighbours.

What do they talk about? Those little clusters of men that sit at the end of roads in bamboo shed-type things. While everyone is scattered and inside? Well I think they are there at the end of roads — but I don’t really quite know because I’m inside out of the rain. So I’m not really seeing it.

But I do see men on the sides of roads in pouring rain fixing motor cycles, or shovelling dirt, or driving tricycles behind plastic bags, or going to sea, or getting on buses. Still wearing their thongs, or maybe a pair of jeans instead of shorts.

In this colder month, wind pours through my windows. So does smoke followed by mosquitos or maybe it’s the other way around. Where do they come from? Mosquitos? And how do they know to flee into my windows? They come, these cooler months, the mossie months. The dengue comes too and fills the local hospital. Fires are lit, big smokey fires. Piling green leaves and refuse stuff onto flames to make thick smokey curtains and send the mosquitos away coughing and spluttering.

And sometimes you will go the whole day in a long sleeved shirt, and I’ve even seen thick jackets in the big malls. Tights and boots too! Boots are the most ridiculous thing here. (Well actually they aren’t because there is so much mud maybe they really are an excellent concept.)

In fact I had a pair here (boots that is) when I first came. And my feet almost fell off the end of my legs they were so hot. Mercifully someone stole them when I went to the toilet at a bus terminal. I cursed and lamented a few days later when I eventually discovered their loss. And it was months before I could actually see the blessing in losing the responsibility of owning an expensive, heavy, cold-weather pair of boots that I had taken off because they were so bloody hot and I couldn’t stand them on my feet a second longer.

Sometimes it takes a while. To cool down that is.

© 2018 Melinda J. Irvine

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• Daily Post: Carve
• I’m part of Post A Day 2018
• Location: Estancia, Iloilo (Philippines)