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Durin, Geraldine, Mayumi, Spring/2014 (Photo courtesy of Durin Chappe)
For most cooking, Geraldine's family used sticks of the hardwood mirabilis, in the “dirty” kitchen behind the house, but for torta'ng kalamputi -- fish, flour, egg, fried in coconut oil – Geraldine turned on the gas in the small range inside.
We indulged in a few other luxuries that trip, including more fish than either of us was used to eating. Burot-burot (mackerel scad) was then 90 ($2) pesos a kilo and the most expensive fish, lapu-lapu (grouper), was 280 ($6.25) pesos.
In the wake of Typhoon Odette and Covid-19, it is hard to think of eating anything but bulad (dried fish), particularly as a kilo of potatoes now costs what grouper did then.
It was another kind of bagyo (typhoon) that overwhelmed me at first. The veritable press of people creates the friendliness the world is well familiar with. But it is precisely the Filipino's fluency with each other, the socialization and interconnectedness, which made me think of one word, in its truest sense: “civilized.”
In my Westerner's carapace, I felt distinctly poor. So I did what I could to be part of things. I grated coconut, to press for kinilaw (ceviche) and mongo (lentil/squash stew), rinsed rice and washed dishes. I did some small house repairs.
After three wonderful months, I loved the place -- and myself in it -- but I could not, in the end, bring myself to move there permanently. I still had my parents to be present for, a house to finish, and a commercial fishing job that took me from Downeast Maine to Alaska every year.
Keeping Maine winter at bay with Philippine flag - front porch (Photo courtesy of Durin Chappe)
I was, in short, still loyal to a fish. Pacific cod had paid for the blueberry land and woods and the house I was still building on it.
I am driving the boat; this is my view, two decks down, of a deckhand, gaffing cod aboard in Jan/2005, Bering Sea. (Photo courtesy of Durin Chappe)
So it took considerable faith for Geraldine to throw her lot in with me later that year and immigrate to a place in almost every way more isolated than the third-class municipality from which she came.
Even as I assured her, we'll work something else out if you don't like it, my naivete was staggering, given with what I know now about OFWs and their lifelines to families at home. I'm guessing that Geraldine probably lavished considerably less time than myself, on the question of staying.
Neither did we hem and haw about it. Instead, we got to work, laying hardwood flooring and a pink granite hearth, making curtains. We tended to a huge crop of tomatoes and picked and froze blueberries. At the end of October, we married in our sunroom, in front of two great aunts and some of Geraldine's relatives, who drove up from Massachusetts.
It was a year of bagyos. One aunt returned to her apartment in Brooklyn, New York, only to find that Hurricane Sandy had knocked out her building's power. The super helped her walk up 15 flights of stairs to her apartment.
In early February of 2013, a nor'easter named Nemo began dumping record amounts of snow along the Eastern Seaboard, including a foot and a half, in one day, on coastal Maine -- about a fourth of our annual total.
Geraldine was already used to shoveling snow by then. I'd left her with my parents, shortly before Christmas, to join the longliner Blue Gadus in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. She also helped yard armloads of split hardwood inside, for the woodstove.
My father Marc, his Aunt Millie, Geraldine, my mother's Aunt Dorothy; Aunt Millie was the one who returned home to her apartment in Brooklyn, NY, after Sandy had knocked our power to the building; she climbed 15 floors to her apartment, with the help of the super.
The view across the bay in Dutch Harbor, Alaska
Meanwhile, the ice pack in the Bering Sea was further south than ever that year. I came home, in mid-March, after three good trips. After 24 years of going to sea, I'd been ordinary seaman and captain both and decided to grow legs and turn full-time landlubber.
We stayed a month or two more with my folks, until the weather warmed, then moved back into the house we were working on the previous fall. By then, Geraldine was pregnant. I picked up some carpentry work and Geraldine worked on selling the crocheted hats she'd learned to make on Youtube, with skills taught to her early on by Tiya Lita. True to form, she'd made a quick study of everything.
“While I persist in advocating for a semi-permanent return to Cebu, Geraldine seems to grow more steadfast about staying put.”
While the nursery was new to both of us, nearly everything else was novel to Geraldine: driving, not walking to the mercado (market); using a washing machine and convection oven; a potato peeler. Having the freedom to read undisturbed. Space.
Yet, she soon found Filipinas everywhere – from Tarlac, Carcar, Cantanduanes, Ormoc City – and home seemed much closer when we found local sources for Ligo sardines, frozen bangus (milkfish) and sinigang (tamarind) mix. For a while, she made a small business of lumpia (spring rolls), pancit (noodles) and empanada (meat pies).
Geraldine (3rd from left) with her Filipino sisterhood in Maine. (Photo courtesy of Durin Chappe)
I am the only sentimental one about the things she no longer does. She does not miss for an instant the hand-washing of clothes in the labador (wash basin). Though she still turns clothes inside out to dry, there is markedly less bleaching damage at 45 degrees north.
At the nine-month mark, my dogged preference for a daughter was such that, even as we hastily packed for the hospital, we had not yet arrived at a single male name.
Fortunately, my wish was answered when, just before midnight, there emerged a coal-black mane and chalky white trunk. Her ruby lips looked as if they had been hand-painted. A name we'd picked out weeks earlier was waiting for her: Mayumi Marie.
A Tagalog name, meaning “gentle” or “modest,” when paired with my mother's middle name, made for nice symmetry. Transiting Narita Airport a year later, we discovered that Mayumi is also a popular Japanese name, whose three kanji characters mean, respectively, truth, reason, and beauty.
Seven years later, in Mayumi's month, the three of us warm ourselves in front of a brightly burning woodstove, a far cry from my smoke-filled childhood, when we'd wake up in parka and longjohns and fire up the Glenwood C, to take the chill off the kitchen and fry our bacon and eggs. My father exaggerates nothing with his claim that it never got above 60 in the winter time.
There is a slightly festive air now, with our underwear and socks suspended, like prayer flags, on three lengths of clothesline, above the stove. Inside out, of course.
A stranger looking at Geraldine, in her polka-dotted bathrobe, huddled in front of the stove, would think she is not long for this cold place. Yet a funny transformation has been happening since she arrived. While I persist in advocating for a semi-permanent return to Cebu, Geraldine seems to grow more steadfast about staying put. By now, she has more Pinoy friends than I ever had. We attend their Christmas and birthday parties, where there is humba (tender pork), laing (stewed taro) and pancit, karaoke and raucous laughter. American husbands stand around idly and squint, as the mystery of all this happiness eludes them.
In the summer, we join a throng at the local pier, twitching up squid for adobo (marinated) and mackerel, to fry and for inun-unan (vinegar spice stew). No matter what she's doing, Geraldine always seems to enjoy herself -- and this is one of the more important lessons she has for me. Wherever I am, it's important to make an effort to smile.
Durin Chappe is a carpenter and writer in Sullivan, Maine.
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