When farm production is good, my father would go to Silay, Negros Occidental to visit our grandmother Pilar, and to Iloilo to see our aunt Consejo Mirasol Garrido.
On his return to our barrio, he would surprise us with new things we have never had before. One time he came home with a “grafonola” and lots of new farm tools. There were bales of cloth for us including my cousins. My mother Pansay would sew all the bales of cloth in one design but in different colors. We looked like soldiers in uniform!
When farm work was done, my parents would allow us to join other young boys and girls to go to fiestas, novenas and some social events in our barrio. In this way we get to meet other teenagers like us.
Most of Saturdays and Sundays, we devoted our time to food preparation like making clean rice from the raw grains of palay. Since there were no rice mills before in our barrio, we milled our palay using the wooden mortar and pestle to extract the white rice grains from dried raw palay grains.
Later, father made a wooden “paligiran”. It is a simple machine where raw palay was spread on a flat platform and a big, smooth round roller, manned by two or more persons, would be rolled over these dried palay grains. Then white rice was broken and cleaned.
Teenage boys and girls volunteered to roll the long cylindrical wood to extract rice and at the same time make overtures to our cousins who were older than us. This was one of our social activities, which made our lives pleasant and purposeful.