My Home (By Jose Rizal)

My Home

I had nine sisters and one brother. My father, a model of fathers, had given us an education in proportion to our modest means. By dint of frugality, he was able to build a stone house, to buy another, and to raise a small nipa hut in the midst of a grove we had, under the shade of banana and other trees

There the delicious atis displayed its delicate fruit and lowered its branches as if to save me the trouble of reaching out for them. The sweet santol, the scented and mellow tampoy, the pink makopa vied for my favor. Father away, the plum tree, the harsh but flavorous casuy, the beautiful tamarind pleased the eye as much as they delighted the plate. Here the papaya stretched out its broad leaves and tempted the birds with its enormous fruit; there the nangka, the coffee, and the orange trees perfumed the air with the aroma of their flowers. On this side the iba, the balimbing, the pomegranate with its abundant foltage and its lovely flowers bewitched the senses; while here and there rose elegant and majestic trees loaded with huge nuts, swaying their proud tops and graceful branches, queens of the forests,. I should never end were I to number all our trees and amuse myself identifying them.

In the twilight innumerabe birds gathered from everywhere and I, a child of three years at most, amused myself watching them with wonder and joy. The yellow kuliawan, the maya in all its varieties, the kulae, the maria kapra, the martin, all the species of pipit joined the pleasant harmony and raised in varied chorus a farewell hymn to the sun as it vanished behind the tall mountains of my town.

Then the clouds, througha caprice of nature, combined in a thousand shapesm which would suddenly dissolve, leaving me only the slightest recollections. Even now, when I look out of the window of our house at the splendid panorama of twilight, thoughts that arenlong since gone renew themselves with nostalgic eagerness.

Came then the night to unfold her mantle, somber at times, for all its stars, when the chaste Diana failed to course throughnthe sky in pursuit of her brother Apollo. But when she appeared, a vague brightnessnwas to be discerned in the clouds; then seemingly they would crumble; and little she was to be seen, lovely, grave, and silent, rising like an immense globe which an invisible and omnipotent hand drew through space.

At such times my mother gathered us all together to say the rosary. Afterward we would go to the azotea or to some window from where the moon could be seen, and my ayah would tell us stories, sometimes lugubrious and at other times gay, in which skeletons and buried treasures and trees that bloomed wih diamonds were mingled in confusion, all of them born of an imagination wholly Oriental. Sometimes she told us that men lived on the moon, or that the markings which we could perceive on it were nothing else than a woman who was forever weaving,

--Jose Rizal