My Home
by Dr. Jose Rizal
I have nine sisters and one brother. My father, a model of fathers, had given us and education in proportion to our modest means. By dint of frugality, he was able to build a stone house, to buy another, and to raise a small nipa hut in the midst of a groove we had, under the shade of the banana and other trees.
There the delicious atis displayed its delicate fruit and lowered its branches as if to save me from trouble of reaching out for them. The sweet santol, the scented and mellow tampoy, the pink makopa vie for my favor. Farther away, the plum tree, the harsh but flavorous casuy, the beautiful tamarind pleases the eye as much as they delighted the palate. Here, the papaya stretched out its broad leaves and tempted the birds with its enormous fruit; there the langka, the coffee and the orange trees perfumed the air with the aroma of their flowers. On this side is the iba, , the balimbing, the pomegranate with its abundant foliage and its lovely flowers bewitched the senses; while here and there rose the majestic palm trees loaded with huge nuts, swaying their proud tops and graceful branches, queens of the forests. I should never end where I to number all our trees and amuse myself identifying them.
In the twilight, innumerable birds gathered from everywhere and I, a child of three years at most, amused myself watching them with wonder and joy. The yellow kuliawan, the maya in all its varieties, the kulae, the maria karpa, the martin, all the species of pipit joined the pleasant harmony and raised in varied chorus a farewell hymn to the sun as it vanished behind the tall mountains of my town.
Then the clouds, through a caprice of nature, combined in a thousand shapes, which would suddenly dissolve, leaving me with only the slightest recollections. Even now, when I look out of the window of our house at a splendid panorama of twilight, thoughts that are long gone renew them with nostalgic eagerness.
Came then the night to unfold her mantle, somber at times, for all its stars, when the chaste Diana failed to course through the sky in pursuit of her brother Apollo. But when she appeared, a vague brightness was to be discerned in the clouds; then seemingly they would crumble; and little she was to be seen, lovely, grave, and silent, rising like an immense globe which an invisible and omnipotent hand drew through space.
At such time, my mother gathered us all together to say the rosary. Afterward, we would go to the azotea or to some window where the moon could be seen, and my ayah would tell us stories, sometimes lugubrious and at other times gay, which in skeletons, buried treasures, and trees that bloomed with diamonds mingled in confusion. All of them born of an imagination wholly Oriental. Sometimes she told us that men lived on the moon, which we could perceive on it, were nothing else than the woman who was forever weaving.
