Wide-eyed and Wandering

“Now you’re ready to get married, Inday”, she smiles toothily at me. Her brown hands inspect the malunggay leaves I had carefully handpicked, searching for stray inedible branches. She had skillfully picked through her bunch, no sooner building a mountain of greens on her plate. I plucked through mine one by one. Handpicking malunggay was a sweaty task. The leaves were as soft as rose petals, as small as a pinkie nail. But Nang, a common name for the elders, was patient to those whose hands have never known domesticity. Her makeshift hut, where she sold food to tourists, opened to a garden by a cliff. She decides to get a few more ingredients from there. The soup had to be ready for lunch in time to feed customers. But no rush, she tells me. When she returns, she hands me water from a gallon-sized bottle. “Fresh from the waterfalls.” she says, and smiles that toothy smile. I drank. I had visited the Falls earlier. Katibawasan, they called it, a combined name of a primeval hunter and his wife. I hadn’t thought of drinking from it then. Nang positions her plump body beside me and leans over to get from the unpicked bunch. There is a technique to handpicking, she demonstrates. A soft assertive tug at the base of the branch, so leaves can easily separate from their stems. I tried. The leaves came down in a messy, wrinkled clump. I went back to picking them piece by piece. “My two kids lived on this. Poor man’s soup.” she says, for malunggay grew everywhere, and most of the time, it grew without care. Her soft paunch beneath the spaghetti-strapped top and baggy shorts, I noticed, revealed her motherhood. Her flabby arms start to ready the wood-fired stove. She drops ingredients to the broth: onions, tomatoes, squash, dried fish. The leaves were left for last. So as not to overcook them, she advised. My pile was still a molehill on the plate. The broth was starting to simmer. Nang unceremoniously takes the remaining branches from me and cleaned the leaves off effortlessly. When her first customer arrived, asking for soup, I watched the fellow clean off the bowl while chitchatting with Nang. “She helped make that, you know?”, Nang says beamingly while pointing at me. “I see.” the fellow says. “No wonder there were so many stems.” After he leaves, I asked Nang half-jokingly, “I’m ready to get married, yes?” She makes a nonchalant gesture in the air. “Oh, you shouldn’t hurry those things.”