In any place where I write where I live, I am always among old things, as I live in an old house. This house and I are of the same age, built in the late 1960s.

This morning, I write under the beneficence of interminable hammering. Our roof has finally given in and must be changed. When contractors first looked at it, they oohed and aahed at the resilience of this old thing. They looked like they were in a museum, perusing artifacts from another life.

As they began the task of dismantling it, the workers told us that the nails used to fasten were no longer in use and could not be removed like regular nails. They attributed the strength of the roof to its fastening.

The lights in the hallway that connects all our bedrooms are all still original. Made of wood and capiz, they refract light, bathing the hallway in a kind of dreaminess. In my entire life, they have never needed any kind of repair. Their bulbs have been changed but they are as intact as when my parents bought them.

I then think of how easily broken things are these days—how things do not last unlike the old things that live around me. All our doors, cornices, baseboards, and this lovely floor that can no longer be found today are still original. They’re old not just from this house but also from their origin as narra trees. Whose hands made this floor, I wonder?

Constant partners

I realize that even the narra trees that line this house were planted by my mother. They are my most constant partners in the work that I do as a writer. They leaf and re-leaf through the seasons and teach me every day what it means to be rooted long and deep in the earth.

In the garden, my son’s swing stands. Painted every year in bright colors to help him with his sensory integration, this was my swing as a child, too. It has been slightly altered to ensure his safety. Other parts of the swing have been removed, leaving just one seat that has a backrest to keep him from falling. The fasteners have been reinforced for safety, and the first few hours of his morning are spent here. The grass beneath the swing no longer grows as they bear the foot marks from his swinging. In the mornings, he swings, I write, and my mother, now almost 85, the builder of this house, sits with us and prays.

When I was small, swinging at twilight, I’d feel that lurch in my heart, in recognizance of some unrecognizable feeling. I’d tear up a bit and wonder what it was that made my heart swell so. My father would catch me, and shake his head with humor and indulgence and say, “Hay, Ms Melancholia. Such nostalgia in you!” Melancholy is a kind of pensive sadness, and nostalgia means the “ache from an old wound,” a definition I once found from an obscure book I can no longer recall. But at such a young age, what was that wound I could remember so acutely?

Inevitable grief

Everything then was still so new to me. But I already felt old, even as the trees in the garden had not yet risen to give me shade. Could I feel the inevitable grief that comes from becoming old?

I wonder about this, as I have passed the age of my parents when they built this house. Things are beginning to fall in this house: today, the roof, tomorrow the big, old doors, the wood around us falling prey to interminable rain, or intense heat, their woodenness challenged, making them brittle fodder for termites. My fate and state seem tied to this house as I begin to really feel my own aging. If this house, which seemed indestructible, is not, I am not indestructible, too.

But this house continues to teach me the value of old things. That things built with good, sturdy materials will stand the test of time. The bowels of this house root us into the ground, allowing all those who have passed here a kind of shelter and safety that has allowed for a kind of groundedness even when away.

This is Kilometer Zero for all in our family. It is this kind of internal strength that one imbibes from such a place that makes one prepared to go out there into the world, bravely. We all know when the world is much too painful, that one can return to this old, old house and find a measure of unchangeability.

I must go now, engage with the present with all its shiny, shimmery newness. I am not as impressed, I tell you, as I am by the things that remain. I pack away, as I hear the hammering on my roof. The carpenters naturally find a rhythm in their swinging. I take this rhythm with me like a prayer, perhaps the truly oldest thing that can be found here.  —CONTRIBUTED