What We Take For Granted

          I came home from an arduous session of applied Calculus II and, as usual, my grandmother was boiling something in a pot. The cookbook she kept exclusively in her mind was extensive, and she never failed to execute every recipe with delicious precision. Chicken adobo was my first favorite dish but, like all things, that eventually changed. Kare kare took the place of chicken adobo, and then pork sinigang after that. Favorite dishes aside, as a food lover, every dish she made incited within me the greatest of anticipations. “Foooood” my mind would chant like a mantra of Eastern spirituality as the spices and herbs coaxed my nostrils. Anxious for her to finish the task at hand I stepped into the kitchen hoping my looming presence would somehow help the food more quickly reach fruition. The sooner it was in my mouth the better. The scene was a typical one in our household, but that day I noticed something I never had before: the masked tension in the slight curve of her upper back. It was unmistakably there but she hid it from all of us: my grandfather, my parents, my brothers, myself. I saw all of the gravelly, grassy miles of earth her feet had ever carried her over. I heard all of the aspersions that had been spit into her face, simply for believing what she believed. I saw the squalor and filth she was raised around, but not in. I saw the world she knew best and thought about how far away she was from it.

          She was wearing a faded-lime green ESPRIT crewneck sweater, the one she used to give me sink baths in. It was spotted with lint, sleeves rolled up. Floral tsinelas hugged her feet—slippers that would have been thwacking against the linoleum if she had been walking. She picked the ladle up and began to stir the contents of the pot. I knew it was neither chicken nor pork she was stirring, but something else. It was a something that she had been consistently stirring for decades, unnoticed by me. She was stirring love. I saw that the steam rising from the love was not water violently assimilating into the air, but sacrifice. I recognized the twenty years that were selflessly given for me, but that was only a small portion of what I saw. Decades of different colors swirled together: the blue watchfulness that vigilantly guided, and still guides, her five children, my mother being the youngest; the red hope that they would possess the drive necessary to make the most of themselves; the gold and silver shimmers signifying an undying bond between her and my grandfather that promised they would never part, not in this life or the next; the green nurture and the yellow cackling laughter that stymied the various oppressions that bore down on immigrants, both before and after their relocation. The colors brought me to tears. All of that and what did she want in return? For me to wash a few dishes, for me to help bring groceries in from the Odyssey. Above all, the most sacred hope: for me to live a life of safety and of joy, a life of the purpose we so vehemently believed in. I stood there for a long while, unnoticed by her. When she finally turned around, she knew without words why I wept. She came to me and spoke with the Filipina accent that housed the struggle I would never understand but will always be unceasingly grateful for. “You're welcome,” she breathed. She embraced me, eyes brimming with tears, face covered with wetness.