November is the perfect month. It does not hurry to Christmas; in fact, it does not answer to any duty to a season or a festival. The first two days with its thought about all the souls and all the saints are accidents happening on those days. The days leading to nights of ghosts and memorial parks fall on October, an almost perfect month except for one thing: October is a month that seems to leave us immediately as it comes.
November stays with us.
One morning this week, I woke up to the sun on my face. The Earth has shifted! For a human being to be made aware of the physical movement of one’s planet is a step closer to God, or any Almighty, or to a realization about bad architecture. Where before the sun hits only the wall, showering my Mother’s orchids with the tenderest sunshine at seven in the morning, the sun has moved almost 2 feet to where the bigger window is. It pours itself into the house. It tells us to think of how the year has been long and life short.
If the sun is remembered for how it seems to go full circle, the wind comes back in November. It is strong wind, with bits of chill around it. It is not the kind of wind that accompanies storms and disaster but one that has been born out of the memory of the universe. It is the wind of fate, the wind that promises good fortune, the wind that augurs great anticipations.
There is no empty field where we live now in this old city. A new house has been built in front of us. It is a duplex but that is not the point of this act of building. The new house seems to have been built on a whim. A young family, we are told, has earned surpluses for working in the Middle East and has opted to put those earnings into this ugly structure. The cement and metals in the house have stopped the wind coming from the east. Believe me, ugliness happens when you stop the wind or the sun or the sunrise from being seen.
When the world was young, we had a home that faced a wide area covered with cogon and other grasses. Then, we did not count the days leading to Christmas; we looked to the arrival of the wind. My grandmother would look out into that field—a meadow in the middle of the city—and note the grasses with their white blooms. The cottony and feathery flowers, to her, would be a sign that wind was coming.
Which came first, the wind or the cogongrass flowers? That was never an issue with my grandmother, Emilia. Gintatawag an hangin. The wind is being called to blow the flowers and spread more cogon.
With no emptiness to welcome the wind, I rely on how I would see the wind in the flat leaves, the small stems bristling and shaking. I saw that this week. The plants were moving and even the branches of an old mango tree were shaking. On its crown, the Yellow WagTail has arrived but without the crackling voice it is noted for. Called “Tuwad-tuwad” because of its characteristic downward and upward movement of its tail, the bird is also a precursor to the wind. That morning, its tail was vigorously ripping up and down.
November is the month when tails of birds can be blown by the wind.
But the month of November has a personal meaning. November was the month when in my grandparents’ home in Ticao, the women of the clan stopped all kinds of wind to enter a room. My mother was about to give birth to my sister in that room. Not even the midwife and not even my grandfather, the first Sanitary Inspector in the whole of the island, could stop the women in the family from following that proscription: No wind shall touch the mother who had just given birth to a child.
My father used all the sturdy mats of the family to cover the wall so that no air, no wind would invade the room.
All the women in the clan had gathered that day. They were there not just to make sure the wind was not inside the room; they were there to decide on our fate. We were all boys in succession. One of our grandmothers believed that it was bad omen to have three boys and one daughter. This sibling configuration meant that we, in fate, would be pallbearers for the funeral of our sister. We were omens. But then an older, wiser grandmother fascinated them with a more compelling elucidation: four brothers and one sister was not good. Three brothers and one sister, well, that was good, that was love.
That was the last time all our grandmothers would be gathered as one. In that windless, airless room they talked about destinies and our happiness. All of those gathered in that room had all gone to a place where winds and omens are born.
My sister tells me she has a recurring dream of numerous old women gathered around her. She was a day old when they all met around her and no one ever told her of that event. Do not be scared, I recall telling her. They are with you across timeless time and spaces of spaces.
I am not scared, I remember her assuring me.
November, after all, for my sister and all the grand women in the clan, is love without the need for any wind to carry it across generations of joys and the pains those loves shelter.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano