The Perfect Picture

I have passed that vast land a lot of times every time I go back home from the city. But somehow today is the first time I have noticed that it is surrounded by wires and is protected by a big gate. The place has always been a private property is what my mother told me when I was young. Though it is like that, it had been open for so many decades . So when I got home, I asked my mother about it.

"Oh, that! They've been there for some years now," that's what she said.

Back in my hometown, you can find this big rolling land surrounded by tall grasses with some trees in it. If you walk the vast land farther down, you'll find a wide river that flows along the whole town of San Rafael. How is it called again? I am sure I learned it back in elementary. Ah! It is called a prairie, maybe? My great-grandmother used to tell my cousins and I that back then, it was a place where couples ran to when they eloped from home. At the other side of the river is a place my town folks call "Ibayo" and it is where those couples went, riding on a boat, in their hope to protect their love from their families. She used to tell us that it is a place where she and her great-grandparents spent most of their childhood climbing trees, picking fruits and playing with their friends. You see, it was the same for me, for my cousins, for my friends and the other kids in my town.

But it wasn't those romanticized stories of couples that made the place special in my heart but those memories of mine climbing fruit trees with my friends, it is that one scary time when my cousins and I ran so fast as we were chased by a dog and it is all the summer spent with my family swimming in the river with the other families in the town. I could remember the times I went by the river with my family at dawn and waited there until sunrise. I have always blamed that old belief in town just to realized it must have been there to make families closer.

These memories made me nostalgic and I ended up visiting the vast land again. When did it become like this? The vast land that used to be covered with grasses has some garbage piled on it. The clean water where I used to swim has floating plastics in it. Ah, no wonder they closed the place because I would have done the same!

Though it was those plastics littered around the visible problem, I couldn't help thinking it could be us, people. It is our selfish whims and disregard of good things. We should learn when it is a yes and when it should be a no. Don't we people know what needs to be protected?