You know it's summer...

...when you cannot resist the invitation to spend time by a huge body of water even if there are a gazillion filial duties to fulfill and a gazillion more writing deadlines to meet, thus a heavy beach bag it was I carried with the laptop inside. I exaggerate when I use the word gazillion, but the pressure does feel like a gazillion albatrosses hanging around my neck. Oh, to be at the beach with kin spirits! It was an answered prayer.

With the blogger in this photo taken by journalist Alan Robles are Dr. Margarita Holmes, Gemma Luz Corotan-Kolb of Casa Amara in San Juan, Batangas, and Dr. Melen Araos. All our hair are wet from a swim, except for Gemma, Casa Amara's moving body-spirit, who was earlier in the kitchen supervising the making of canapes and guinataang bilo-bilo to be served to us.

In the book I brought with me to the Casa, To Remember to Remember (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), author Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo observed how writers of autobiographical narratives are impelled by a need to recount a past experience, begin a personal exploration and "expand to become an engagement with the world." When women gather, you feel there is something inside them in need of healing and recovery. The break from the urban life that my kinswomen live and move in was more than welcome. I for one will have stories to tell no longer in the farthest future but in the nearest one...while there is time.