When word went around my immediate family circle that I had just put up a blog, the question from all was: “Why Brookside baby?” Friends and colleagues who don’t know my Baguio background commented that the blog’s name sounded like I was abandoned beside a body of water, like Moses in a basket among the river weeds.
My siblings and first cousins on my father’s side knew better. Our childhood summers and later, as we became college students, our semestral breaks were largely spent at 18 M. Roxas street, Lower Brookside, Baguio City. Our widowed grandmother, Telesfora CariƱo Lolarga, built her retirement home in what was once a 1,000-square meter avocado grove.
The three-storey house was of modest dimensions. As the years went by and whenever she had enough savings, a room would be expanded or a roof and a fence added.
And yes, there was a brook behind the backyard. There was no budget for landscaping—my lola knew by instinct where this tree, that bush and those clusters of flowers should grow.
I am hoping that as I add more entries to this blog, I can recover more stories about those Brookside years. Meanwhile, among the first to get excited by the possibilities of this site in tying the scattered branches of our family together is my sister Evelyn Lolarga Trinidad, Embeng to us. We have a family code for “cute”; it’s “cute-at.” Embeng rang me several times, instructing me to open my G-mail and check if her cute-at photos were all in.
So for our buena mano Brookside babe, here she is, a few inches away from falling into Burnham Lake. She must have been five or six years old. Note the background. Yes, the boats then had real sails!
My siblings and first cousins on my father’s side knew better. Our childhood summers and later, as we became college students, our semestral breaks were largely spent at 18 M. Roxas street, Lower Brookside, Baguio City. Our widowed grandmother, Telesfora CariƱo Lolarga, built her retirement home in what was once a 1,000-square meter avocado grove.
The three-storey house was of modest dimensions. As the years went by and whenever she had enough savings, a room would be expanded or a roof and a fence added.
And yes, there was a brook behind the backyard. There was no budget for landscaping—my lola knew by instinct where this tree, that bush and those clusters of flowers should grow.
I am hoping that as I add more entries to this blog, I can recover more stories about those Brookside years. Meanwhile, among the first to get excited by the possibilities of this site in tying the scattered branches of our family together is my sister Evelyn Lolarga Trinidad, Embeng to us. We have a family code for “cute”; it’s “cute-at.” Embeng rang me several times, instructing me to open my G-mail and check if her cute-at photos were all in.
So for our buena mano Brookside babe, here she is, a few inches away from falling into Burnham Lake. She must have been five or six years old. Note the background. Yes, the boats then had real sails!
4 comments:
great blog sis. that picture was taken by a roaming commercial photographer, that was a common sight during the 1960s.
How did you manage to go beyond the fence? That is restricted by the police which in your time were the dreaded Kempetai
hahaha.. i guess babeth bribed the jap "kempei" assigned there with a piece of baguio's once famous cinnamon roll
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