Out of the rains and stormy weather of the past weeks that marooned us indoors came the blessing of unexpected preoccupations—one old, the other new.

The first was our return to sewing, with our old, no-longer-so-reliable Emily—a Singer virtuoso of the highest note—after Argi the youngest stomped on her with much energy many summers ago, when she announced she would sew her first stitch, there would be no stopping her, and embarked on the ambitious project of sewing her first quilted bag.

Emily came away black and blue from the experience and had to be sent away to a sewing machine surgeon, who promptly did major surgery. A knob that must have been her knee or elbow cracked down the middle and was promptly replaced. Her injury was inflicted by the sheer force of a beginner’s willful enthusiasm and ignorance of handling her. An old lady deserves gentler treatment.

And she was never the same after that. Her stitches now leap and jump, about half a foot of good, regular stitches followed by inch-long stretches of solid thread, not unlike the painted dashes you see in the middle of highways.

Mariang Sinukuan

But sew we did, Emily and I, as men’s grievances stormed heaven in the great blinding rain. A kind and quiet preoccupation if there ever was one, imagining, along with the clank-clonk of the machine’s foot pedal, that we were Mariang Sinukuan the Enchanted, in her Arayat lair of San Juan Banyo, where she held court when still alive, sewing together pieces of fabric to compose the finished tapestry of her Inang Pilipinas.

Legend has it that when the enchanted woman, one of the Tres Marias in the triumvirate of our Feminine Matriarchs, was not playing the piano to create enchanted music, she busied her hands with the magic of her stitchery.

Who knows what strange robe or dress was created through an ordinary preoccupation, in the hands of one so extraordinary that she could change image with each click of the camera—from an enchantingly beautiful young woman with long black hair coifed in a chignon, to an old and wrinkled, gray-haired, blind grandmother, which was how she looked before she died?

A framed photo of the young and beautiful Sinukuan who sat on her grand piano did not go unnoticed by a disbelieving Imelda Marcos when she met with the Inang just days before the matriarch passed away in 1991.

And sew we did in the wicked weather that sent gallons of water down our roof and hurled the wind’s tempest to this side of the world. The elements had not been this furious for a long time. Frightening as nature can be in her fury, she remains beautiful. In so much beauty there is terror.

And we listened to kundiman songs (this, the other preoccupation), to twin cassette tapes of the winners and finalists of the 1991 and 1992 Kundiman Fiesta gifted us by Nora Saba. In the furious rain, kundiman never sounded better. The songs of paradise were composed to be heard also along with the voices of the elements. Earth, wind, fire and water—the devas who composed happiness for the dwellers of paradise. The best of the songs belonged to the Kundiman Prince, Francis Batomalaque, who has since spirited himself away to his new domain in Ireland.

Good behavior

Emily can still be tricked into a few good days of good behavior, coaxed and cajoled into the fine stitchery of her good old days, enabling us to come away from our sewing with several pieces of new clothing neatly put together for those costume changes that even poets must undergo in the solitude and simplicity of everyday life. Vanity is not its name, but creative impulse, when the imaginative force cannot be contained in sheets of paper, and Emily substitutes for the pen.

Sewing, like writing, is a solitary preoccupation. The lips are quiet, but the mind whirs away, exploring and wandering as needle takes on fabric and mind pieces together its own mental adventure in the midst of all the stitchery.

Even in sewing, there are two polarities: needle and thread, scissors and fabric, pin and cushion, hook and eye, button and buttonhole, girl snap and boy snap to fasten garment openings together. It is interesting to note which are the males, which the females, coming as they do, never singly but in pairs. They are the masculine and feminine genders, the positive and negative polarities that even in language, in the spoken word, should find their rightful expression. In its physical form, the human being is either man or woman, feminine or masculine, with each one striking a balance with the other, striving to get to the heart of the two within itself.

As the North Pole has the South Pole, and the East the West, day polarizes into night, the yin and yang of the elements.

In the long haul, Mother Nature will give the final answer, the final resolution. And even that is in the nature of things.

Ah, the witchery that comes from all that stitchery, in the torrential rains that did not settle in the plains, but drove down floods from denuded mountain slopes to change forever a land’s geography.