essays in the story "at merienda" by maryanne moll?

Answer 1

Hi,

I found something that essays 'at merienda';

There are stories that can be told a thousand times, stories with an awful weight that to relieve oneself one has to repeat the story over and over and over and over. I, however, do not know whether my story bears retelling. Perhaps I won’t even have the energy to tell it a second time. All I know is that I have to let this story go now, because it is all over. The weight that used to settle on my shoulders and had sometimes drawn blood is now gone. It has, throughout time, turned itself into a fine mist that has all but disappeared. Where has all the weight gone when I have kept it all to myself all these years? Only time, in its eternal jest, can know.



When I was very young my parents and I spent our Sundays at my paternal grandmother’s house. My cousins and I call her Bita, short for Abuelita. I do remember, very vaguely, a time when we called her Lola, but somewhere along the line someone in our family must have gotten the idea to call her in the Spanish. Bita lived, post-Bito (who died of a heart attack when I was a year old) in a large old rented house inside a residential compound that belonged to her friends, the Jordanas, in Naga City, near the San Francisco Church that was built in the 1500’s.

One afternoon, when I was four, I woke up from my nap and eavesdropped on my aunts through a crack in the door. My aunts and my mother and Bita were at the table, eating their merienda. The capiz windows were open, and sunlight was streaming through the opening in that watery kind of yellow-orange that slanted towards a large glass bowl of latik. Itas, the old crone that took care of seven of my aunts and uncles when they were babies, came out of the kitchen with some drinking glasses. At the table was Norma, who was the wife of Bita’s eldest son Herbie. Then there were Mita and Inez, both Bita’s daughters, who came after Herbie. There was also Shirley, the wife of Basting, and Irma, wife of Manolie, both also Bita’s sons. And of course there was my mother, Eden, wife of my father Eddieboy, who was yet another one of Bita’s sons.


Ref: http://www.geocities.com/phil_stories/moll_merienda

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