Still life in Bohol

Pablo Tariman thinks I must've descended from the line of Francisco Dogohoy, he who waged the longest revolt in Philippine history. It comes from my attraction to the province of Bohol. I've visited neighboring Cebu just as many times, but there's nothing like the appeal of people and landscape of Bohol.

I've always envied poet Marjorie Evasco because she has this province to go home to again and again. On our last trip there with Rolly Fernandez in 2014, she brought us to the house restored by aesthete Ino Manalo.

Something clicked in my mind that I brought out my digicam and shot picture after picture. Everywhere I turned there was something worth preserving in digital memory.

The enhanced community quarantine permitted me time to go over these files. What was on my mind as I took them? Perhaps the wish that one day I'd show them to my painting tutor, Norman Chow, with the thought that he'd guide me through a series of works in acrylic on paper canvas. It was never to be. Norman died in 2018.

I don't know about the fate of Ino's house--if I can ever "go home" there again one day. Meantime, I'm left with these images.