Day Pajarillo

Nanay Salme

Medium: ACRYLIC
Size: 16″X20″

My lola(abuela) Short for Salome. Sometimes they call her nanay Omeng. She was a short but powerful woman. Her word was law. She was like our queen mother, we grandchildren feared her. We feared my lolo and uncle too. They were like the royalties in our ancestral house. They were very strict, but I know how she loves all her grandchildren fiercely because she cried the loudest when we lost a cousin. When we spend vacations in her house, she sees to it that we are fed and that we are all home before dark. We all sleep early at her command. They trained us to respect our elders and we get reprimanded for misbehaving. When we wake up, she was already up and about grinding cocoa tablets in her old beaten pot and serve it to us in a huge white ceramic cup. My lolo would crush biscuits into our cocoa and that was our breakfast. Our food was cooked in a claypots over clay stoves with firewood we kids gather from nearby forests. We accompanied my uncle when he went out and our duty was to fill the space in the kitchen stocked with firewood. On some days my lola makes delicacies like biko or suman made of sticky rice for our snacks. She was a good cook and loved cooking.