Inspirational Stories Motivational Experiences Pinoy Life Stories

Buried Treasures
By Margarita Engle

My mother, Eloisa Ferrer y Uria, was born in Trinidad,
Cuba, during the Depression. It was a place and time where
nothing was wasted. During her childhood, containers of
all sorts were hoarded and reused. Broken clothespins and
scraps of cloth were made into toys. The silk threads used
to tie cement sacks were crocheted into beautiful
bedspreads and shawls. And any bare patch of soil could be
a garden. In the central courtyard of her family's old
Spanish-style home, her father planted mangoes, orchids and
chili peppers, filling every nook with beautiful and useful
plants.
On Valentine's Day 1947, my mother met Martin Mondrus,
a visiting artist from Los Angeles who had seen photographs
of picturesque Trinidad and had decided to paint its
colonial architecture. They fell in love and were married.
When my mother moved to California with my father, her
thrifty habits persisted. She scrubbed out empty bleach
bottles and cut holes in them to make birdhouses and
planters. Balls of string became embroidered ornaments.
Bits of cloth turned into elegant patchwork quilts and
garments.
Outdoors, abalone shells and river rocks were set into
homemade stepping stones. The decorative pathways wound
through a tangled mass of wild castor beans. There, my
mother put to work the gardening lessons she had learned
from her father in Cuba. Gradually, she transformed the
wilderness, tackling the dense clay soil of Los Angeles
with shovels and hoes. The steep hillside that served as
our backyard was transformed into a beautifully terraced
garden filled with avocado, almond and guava trees, roses,
nasturtiums, amaryllis and cymbidium orchids.
For years, as she worked in the garden, my mother
would unearth abandoned toys. There were tiny plastic
soldiers holding broken weapons, miniature cowboys mounted
on horses with smashed legs and glossy, rainbow-hued
marbles streaked with hairline cracks.
Most people would have tossed these damaged playthings
into the trash; my mother saw them as precious. When my
sister and I teased her about saving someone else's trash,
she shook her head gently and smiled.
"Just think," she marveled, "this house has a history.
Somebody's children grew up here." It was easy for her to
imagine adventurous little boys building cardboard forts in
their castor bean wilderness.
With the mud lovingly wiped off, the salvaged toys
went into a shoe box on a shelf above the washing machine.
Year after year, they took up space and gathered dust, but
my mother just couldn't get rid of them. She knew that a
child had once treasured the shabby soldiers, cowboys and
marbles. That made them important enough to save.
One day, long after my sister and I had grown up and
left home, a middle-aged stranger knocked on my parents'
door. My mother greeted him. He introduced himself with
some embarrassment.
"I grew up in this house," he explained
apologetically. "I'm in town for my father's funeral, and
I've been feeling nostalgic. Would you mind if I looked
around outside?"
My mother sighed with sympathy and relief.
"I believe I have something that belongs to you," she
said. She went to the back of the house, unearthed the box
and handed it to the stranger. Puzzled, he lifted the lid
- and then gasped in surprise at the bits and pieces of his
boyhood so lovingly preserved. Overwhelmed by the rush of
memories, his eyes misted over. He could barely stammer
his thanks.
Mother just smiled. She had always known that, sooner
or later, her garden's buried treasures would be needed
again. Like dormant seeds, the memories held in those tiny
fragments of plastic and glass were just waiting for the
right time to sprout.