Coconuts

http://lasangpinoy.blogspot.com/2008/02/lp-24-loco-over-coco.html

This entry is part of the Lasang Pinoy blogathon on coconuts.

I first encountered coconut trees while at the air field on Guam on my first trip to the Philippines. I was a mere hint of a child, with a very loud voice and an inexhaustible ability to cry. I was terrified of airplanes, and the fact that we’d already flown from Los Angeles to Guam without incident was completely lost on me. Daddy took me off the plane, jauntily changing the subject. He kept up a banter about what we would see downstairs, and took me up to a case of pastries and asked me if I wanted coffee cake. I turned around while he paid and I saw the coconut trees for the first time. Tall and slender and waving in the breeze, with their fronds waving like multiple hands. They were unlike any tree I had ever seen before.

Later that day, in Manila, coconut trees were everywhere- outside the windows, along the roads, in the distance. They were also in my blood.

Because of my grandmother, Mercedes Verdotte de Jesus Joaquin, I am part coconut. My DNA is formed in that strand in thousands of years of coconuts feeding, housing, anointing, providing for my ancestors on the island on Marinduque.

My great-grandmother, Gavina Verdotte had two coconut plantations, Libtangin and Bahi on the island. The places are the stuff of legend now, with the memories evoking endlessly long afternoons of languor, and the family phrase, “Waiting for coconuts to drop.” The old places were shelter to the family after WW2, while everybody waited for the winds of fate to change and the present to speed up. My mother and aunt went to convent school on the island, reading Isabel Clark’s novels while sitting on a sea wall as wide as a road, with coconut trees dominating the land view.

My grandmother introduced me to coconuts via bucayo, a candy made from molasses and coconut. I met halo-halo that that strands of young coconut in the milky essence. I loved anything cooked in coconut milk.

A favorite drink was fresh coconut milk straight from the fruit, the top slide off with a straw inserted. It had a pleasing elemental tang to it.

In the years we frequented the beach, my grandfather’s cousin, Tia Pacing would render coconut oil from the nut meats. She would fry the coconut meat on low heat, and collect the oil and bottle it. In later years my classmates and I would make a concoction of Tia Pacing’s coconut oil and Coca-Cola to achieve mahogany tans. We’d comb coconut oil through our long hair, unknowingly repeating a cultural tradition eons old. We smelled delicious.

At home in Baguio, the rhythm of the maids feet as they used coconut husks to polish the floor was a weekly occurrence, now the stuff of sweet memory. Back and forth they would slide, singing, while they turned the floors to glass. When Bud was in Manila the last time I asked for floor wax and coconut husks hoping to recreate these sounds and smells of the past.

My cousin Carissa has a splendid ginataan recipe, a coconut concoction of such exquisite taste. Not too sweet, served warm with spoons. It is a perfect winter sweet dish.

My modern global family loves coconut curry. My youngest son is a connoisseur of green Thai curries. My daughter who bakes makes two unforgettable desserts, one a cake with coconut milk, the other a coconut flan.

If the world depends on coconuts, I depend even more on them. I need them to anchor my dreams and feed me through dark winters.

I didn’t realize how precious those sentinel trees would be, how much I would miss them, need them, want them, and feed them to my own children who are partly made of coconuts too.