WET FIELDS

IN THE RICE FIELDS

I was so surprised when she tip-toed; held me on my nape and kissed me. It was a very passionate kiss. Her lips were burning hot. I felt her pent-up desire she wanted me to be aware of. And her kiss was waking up a heat between my legs.

“I swallowed your saliva,” she explained.

“So, I have a part of your genius within me. I am confident I can hurdle the exam.”

“You are full of crap,” I told her tapping softly her forehead with my knuckles.

“Have you followed my technique?” I asked her when we meet the following week.

She just giggled and stuck out her tongue to tease me and quidkly went inside her house.

Just as what had been agreed, I went home every weekend. So, on Saturdays and Sundays I was at home. But on that semestral break, Mer asked me if she and Jenny could spend the semestral vacation in Caranglan. She told me that she wanted to experience what was living in a rural communiy really feel. She also wanted our daughter to experience the same.

So, with our luggage inside our jeep, I brought our vehicle together with my wife and daughter to Caranglan.

Lissa was surprised when she saw Mer and Jenny.

“Whoa, Ma’am you are so beautiful. You look like my favorite actress Bea Alonzo!” she exclaimed with her characteristic chuckle.

“Now I know why Sir Greg was always in a hurry to go home each weekend.”

I noted her putting ‘sir’ before my name.

“Please stop calling us, Ma’am and Sir. It is too formal. Just plain ‘Ate’ or ‘Kuya’ will do.” Mer told Lissa.

‘Ate’ was the name Filipinos called an elder sister. It became a generic name for elder woman. ‘Kuya’ was for older man. It was traditionally use as a gesture of respect to elder people putting ‘Ate’ or ‘Kuya’ before the proper name.

“I never expect that it is so beautiful here, Greg,” Mer herself exclaimed.

“This is called rustic beauty. The palay, and the fields. The breeze is so cool and refreshing.”

Mer was wearing denim jeans and flesh-colored shirt. Her porcelain-white complexion was highlighted in the sun-burnt rice fields. We were walking on the patched dried-mud pathway which was gapped intentionally to allow the water to pass through to another rice paddy downstream.

I caught Mer by her waist and carried her to the other side. Jenny followed us but put her slippers on her elbows and waded through the mud.

“Mom, you are too big to allow yourself to be carried by dad!” Jenny teasingly called on her mom.

Mer just laughed and clung to my neck for me to achieve my balance carrying her through the narrow dried-mud patched pathway. I put her down under the shades of a mango tree. It was there that we erected a makeshift hut to rest and cook our meals while working in the fields.

“Tita, what are you doing? “I heard Jenny was gawking at what Lissa was doing in a shallow pond.

She was already knee deep at the muddy water transferring the water with the plastic basin in her hands to another pond. I saw Jenny removing her slippers and leaving them at the edge of the pond and waded with Lissa.

“I’m catching hito and bulig for our lunch later on,” we heard Lissa told Jenny.

Bulig was the local name for a type of mudfish which could be found only in rice fields in Eastern Asia. Hito was our local cat fish.

We found it amusing watching Jenny helping Lissa groped in the muddy water for the fish.

“I got one Tita,” Jenny would proudly show off a small mud fish wriggling on her hands.

“Jenny be careful with the cat fish it has sharp whiskers,” Mer warned our daughter.

I felt proud and happy to see my daughter who was raised in the city, but she seemed to enjoy the simple activities like catching fish for lunch. This was the simplicity of rural life where you needed to be resourceful and work hard to be able to eat. This was my world.

And with my daughter embracing the environment dear to me was always heart-warming.

After making sure that they caught all the fishes in that dried-up pond, Lissa took Jenny to the adjacent rice paddy where they gathered edible snails.

When Mang Usting arrived in the field, he brought with him some vegetables and rice. Mer and Lissa assisted Mang Usting to prepare our lunch. I gathered some firewood as Mang Usting prepared the makeshift firewood stove by putting two sets of three boulders grouped together to hold the pots and pans to cook the rice and vegetables. We grilled the bigger fishes and cooked the smaller ones together with the snails in coconut milk. Lissa had brought from their kitchen the powdered coconut milk and some seasonings for the dishes.

The aroma of the steaming newly milled rice filled the air as it was cooking in the pot. Lissa and Jenny had cleaned themselves in the nearby stream.

I watched my lovely wife with the sweat on her face and a trace of charcoal on her arms as she battled with the firewood stove. She was used to cooking in the stone-topped counter with her gas range, oven mitt and apron.

It was amazing to see her going native. She noticed I was staring at her. She implicitly sidled near me and took a peck at my lips. I hugged her closer.

“What can you say about going back to stone age?” I joked.

“I can endure and enjoy it just to be with you and Jenny.” She whispered.

“This is your world. And this is not bad. Only a little bit challenging.”

It was heart-warming to see my wife and daughter who were used to the luxury of living in the city experiencing the hard life in the farm.

This experience would make them realize how lucky some people were with the new technology making life a little bit easier. And how people in remote farming communities were struggling to cope without them.

I want them to feel with nature, to be closer to it. I wanted them to appreciate the natural way of life without the man-made comfort enslaving the city folks.

“Come, let us eat,”Mer urged everybody while she put calamansi juice on the fermented fish sauce. This was a delicious sauce to dip the grilled fishes.

The snails and the small fishes cooked in coconut milk with hot chili-pepper was mouth-watering. The newly milled rice was still smoking-hot and was spread on banana leaves. We ate with our bare hands. It was a picnic in the rice fields.

I smiled watching Mer sucking at the snail. She noticed my stare.

“I know you are the expert in sucking--- snails,” she whispered.

I smiled at her teasing. She was always telling me that I was the champion in sucking her. Down there and her boobs.

I took out a knife and quickly sharpened a bamboo stick and gave it to Jenny.

“Here, take out the meat of the snail with this stick,” I urged my daughter after I saw her sucking a snail to no avail. She smiled as I taught her how to use the pointed stick to pluck out the snail meat from its shell.

After eating our simple lunch, I cut-open one of the watermelons Lissa had gathered from the nearby field. It was so big that I needed only to open that one and it was more than suffice for all of us.

“I feel so full,” Mer told all of us.

“It is much filling and delicious than anything I have eaten in a fancy restaurant in the city.”

“I think I will be gaining weight here before my vacation ends.” She added as she helped Lissa clean the makeshift table.

We were already swinging at the hammock I installed between the two sturdy branches of the mango tree when she noticed Jenny was not around.

“Where is your daughter?” she asked me.

“I saw her a while ago with Lissa going down to the stream,” I answered.

“There she is!” I pointed to Jenny at the tail of Lissa. She was smiling sheepishly.

“She asked me for the toilet,” Lissa told us.

The toilet in this place was anywhere secluded.

“Have you washed yourself?” Mer was likely to scold Jenny.

“She washed herself on the stream,” Lissa told us smiling.

“Gosh, I forgot to bring some tissue papers or even soap,” Mer seemed to be in uttered annoyance.

“Forget it, what about if there is no soap and tissue? Does it make people unclean and unsanitary?” I asked Mer.

She shrugged and pushed the hammock a little faster before cuddling me.

“Can I bring Jenny farther from here?” Lissa asked.

“There are some guavas and Atis in that hill not far from here,” she added.

“Okay, but don’t venture too far,” Mer gave Lissa her permission.

“Go and take some plastic bags and come with me,” she asked Jenny who went back to the makeshift hut and came to her with two plastic bags in both hands.

I saw Mang Usting quietly walked away to the adjacent fields. He wanted to give us a little privacy while he himself would want to spend this siesta perhaps to take a nap under some shades.

“I realized Greg, that for more than a decade of our marriage, there are still lots of things that I don’t know about you,” Mer told me when we were alone in the hammock.

“Your work and my work are poles apart. I asked then what makes you love this kind of work. Why did you finished a five-year course only to work far from the city and with the common folks.”

“Perhaps, I understand now. It’s like going back to nature, the serenity, natural foods. Everything is provided for by nature. Yet is not free. You have to work for it.”

I hugged her closer to me hearing her spoken of these things. I myself could not understand why I had chosen this kind of work. Maybe it was in my blood. Though my late parents were not farmers. My father and mother were former teachers. But ever since I was a young kid, I loved the feel of mud in my legs and in my hands. I even fashioned some likeness of animals turning mud into clay and spent endless afternoons playing with it. My late father would tell me about having a degree on sculpting later on.

“Nature and humans were created side by side,” I told my wife as I moved the hammock gently with my feet pushing it against the ground.

“We are with nature from the day we are born to our moment of death. There is the adage that tells; men came from dust and to the dust they will return.”

“But we believe in our own infallibility. From our earliest existence until this era, man declares war on nature, instead of establishing a symbiotic relationship, we try to control nature as if we can,” I philosophized as I gently caressed her soft skin.

She pinched me right on my flaccid d**k.

“Our conversation is serious, but your hands are going naughty,” she giggled as I could feel her dainty hand caressing my d**k on top of my trousers.

I looked around to see if there were people that could see us. We have only each other. I touched her crotch through her Jeans. And held her boobs through her shirt.

“Naughty, naughty Greg,” she chuckled.

Our naughty private game made us both hungry for each other. We had just finished kissing each other when we heard the excited voice of Jenny from afar.

“Mom…look what I’ve got!” she almost fell down hurdling the terraces of the rice fields.

She had on the hem of her dress she fashioned into a bag some ripe and green guavas. She proudly showed it to her mom. I took note of the fact that our daughter would always call the attention of her mom and would ask her permission before doing things. Jenny was her mom’s girl. I felt a little bit jealous about it.

But perhaps it was because of the fact that she always had Mer on her side while I was almost always away with my kind of work.

“Go and wash the fruits before you ate them,” Mer ordered Jenny.

But we could see she was already nibbling a guava. Her mom could only shake her head in exasperation. We then saw Lissa carrying in both hands two plastic bags full of fruits she gathered.

“We’re lucky to find plenty of ripe Atis and papayas.” She told us panting. I estimated the fruits to weigh more than ten kilos.

“I gather these for Ate Mer, so she can enjoy our fruits here in Caranglan.”

“Jenny enjoyed climbing guava trees.”

“You did?” Mer glued her gaze at Jenny who smiled sheepishly.

“I can boast to my classmates when the vacation is over that I am an expert on climbing guava trees,” she told her mom.

I could only smile and chuckle my approval. It was not ordinary for city kids to climb up guava trees nowadays. Guava trees simply vanished from the suburbs. Guavas became one of imported fruits hawked by vendors in busy city streets.

That night, I was busy writing down my notations in my notebook as Mer was busy too preparing our dinner. I found it beneficial for me that Mer was here. At least my dinner was different from quick meals I used to have.

I used to open a can of sardines or beans or canned corned beef to go along with left over rice. I just boiled some ready to cook soups or just pushed the insipid meal with hot coffee.

The aroma of her cooking was filling the small house. Jenny was with Lissa at the adjacent house. I stood up from where I sat to check what Mer was cooking for dinner. I laughed when I saw her frying some egg plants.

“There was plenty of left-overs from the grilled fishes and the snail cooked in coconut milk.” She explained.

“Lissa took her half. I will just reheat these. The rice is ready.”

I hugged her from behind. I kissed her on the nape. She reached for my d**k behind her back.

“Have this ready after dinner.” She whispered. I rubbed my hardening d**k at her ass and took hold of her warm boobs.

“Stop it, I’m frying eggplants and your naughty eggplant is making me horny.” She moaned. She turned her lovely face towards me and kissed me.

“Go and take your shower as I prepare our dinner.” She hissed at me.

“And call your daughter after you’re done. She should clean herself before we eat.”

We have had our dinner and Mer was with her turn at the shower while I finished cleaning the dishes. Jenny was browsing on the internet in my laptop.

Mer was putting some hand and body lotion after finishing her shower when Lissa framed herself at the doorway.

“Good evening Kuya Greg,” Lissa greeted me when she saw me sitting at the other wooden seat. Mer could hear her from the open bedroom.

“I am thinking that Jenny is big enough to sleep between you and Ate Mer. And besides, the bed is only for a single person.” Said she.

“My bed is bigger. Jenny can sleep over there with me.” She offered.

“I have a desktop there too, Jenny.” Lissa was insinuating that Jenny could also browse and play her favorite internet game in her room.

I felt that it was a good idea, though I was ready to sleep on the floor while Mer and Jenny could sleep together on the bed. Mer could just go down when Jenny would be sleeping. And we would do what we would like to do the rest of the night.

Jenny was all smiles when she looked at me as if to hear my opinion about what Lissa was offering. But before I could say anything, I saw Mer coming out from the bedroom. We knew she heard what Lissa was saying.

“Do you want to sleep with your tita Lissa?” We heard Mer asked Jenny.

She nodded,”Can I mom?” she asked her mother.

“You can but don’t stay late playing games on her desktop.” She warned our daughter.

“Thanks mom, I won’t,” she promised her mom.

She hurriedly planted a good night kiss on Mer’s cheeks.

She went near me and kissed me too. Mer kissed her back, and I did too.

“Good night mom. Good night dad,” she waved at us before heading to Lissa’s house. I sighed. I thought I needed to bear the fact that I played only a second fiddle when it comes to parenting over my daughter.

Mer was back in the bedroom when Lissa went quickly back at me as I was closing the door.

“Enjoy!” she whispered winking at me.

TO BE CONTINUED…