My mother-in-law died today. It is with great sadness that I write this.
We knew it was coming. She had been ill these past two years, and we had time to ready ourselves. Or so I thought. Today it came anyway, and it was still a shock.
I lost my own mother fifty years ago. By the time I married into this family, I had already been without her for nine years. I came with no mother to call my own. And then I had her. I called her Mommy, and she became the mother I had been missing.
And now she is gone. I will miss her terribly.
There was a time our relationship went sour. We found our way back, and what we built after was stronger than before. And most of what we built, we built on the mountain.
For the last eight years, the coffee farm gave me the mountains, and the mountains gave me her. We planned the planting together in 2018, and she helped me draw the layout. It was Mommy who brought us Farmer Edmon. In the early days she sat beside me and translated my plans to him in Kankanaey, line by line, because she knew the land and I was still learning it.
She taught me the kalasan. The native trees, and how they had to be nurtured. From her I learned about Lola Agnep, who planted coffee here in 1906, and she carried so many stories about that coffee and the way it was brewed. Mind the birds, she told me. Don’t let the locals kill them. And there was one bird she spoke of, with twelve notes in its song.
I understand now what she meant. The kalasan and the birds protect the plants from the pests. She knew that long before I did.
We planned it together. We drew the layout together. The rest she gave me freely: Farmer Edmon, the names of the trees, Lola Agnep’s stories, the birds. Everything I know about this land, I learned beside her.
I will never forget her love of the mountains. Her love of the land.
The coffee we drink now grows in rows we drew together. And somewhere in the kalasan, a bird with twelve notes has gone quiet.
