When we were very young

While I was in between jobs this year, I had time to look over old albums and retake photos of the contents in hopes that I could preserve them through my Facebook albums and this blog. I managed to upload a number in FB, and they got a wide range of comments from page visitors, comments like how happy the children looked or how come we didn't buy the kids nice clothes (from disgruntled fashion-conscious daughter and niece).

Hermie Beltran put it so well when he commented: "As always, old photos, like old songs, touch our deepest chords."

Here I am getting all sentimental and "emo" with the holidays and a new year approaching. So before the photos, the old-fashioned kind, not the ones from the digicam, are feasted on by silverfish and termites, I'm posting them during this lull between deadlines.

I wonder how we will all look like 10 years down the road?

At my cousins' house on McKinley road, Forbes Park.

With my grand-aunt Lucy Yatco Nelle who worked for the longest time at Coca-Cola Corp. (I was already in college and she was still working for Coke. This somehow made me partial to that soda.)

Dad holds me up at the old Server pool in Forbes Park, still in the halcyon '50s. Daddy was a sportsman in his own way: he could swim, ride a horse, bowl, fish, jog, play golf.

That's cousin Shorty Server carrying me on my second birthday in our house in Santa Mesa, Manila.

Fast forward to the '80s. That's my partner of 27 years Rolly Fernandez enjoying his day off with his young wife (that should be me) at Puerto Azul, Cavite, in February 1985, a few months before our first child was born.

Here I am, pregnant with Kimi, at the first home Rolly and I made in Antipolo, Rizal, 1985. Rolly had a bar built to divide the kitchen-dining areas from the receiving area. (I must ask my techie daughter how to turn my photo right side up. Sorry about that.)

And here are my girls, the older one ill with asthma at the time this picture was taken, the younger one, Ida, showing the makings of a fattie. But Ida grew to be tall and slim. Kimi was strong enough to attend this birthday party at my friend Lulu Camello Pasamba's house sometime in the '80s.

The circle of life nearly completes itself.Soundtrack from the movie "Lion King" can be heard in the background. Kimi is now a mother herself. Her daughter Kai (infamously nicknamed Butones by this grandma) has brought so much happiness in our lives that I can't help but close my visual narrative with her as clincher.