Relax, Read and Weep

There’s another old tree in our garden… (I guess there’s two points I want to make here: one is that you don’t have to go too far to find inspiration to write and two, with all the juicy prime-time news tonight, here in the Philippines, there’s still nothing much to blog about).  

It’s been standing in the garden for years just shedding its dead spindly leaves for us to rake up but suddenly it decides to catch attention…. it blooms:

It’s the first time it did that, you see.  None of us nor even our neighbors with the same tree growing in their yard knew that it could bloom like that.

 

Still it begs the question:  So what?

Curious, we climbed the roof and had fun harvesting the bloom from high atop the tree when the sun came out for a peep a day after two spontaneous, out of nowhere twisters north and south of us pulled out electrical posts and caused short power outages.  If you check out the overcast sky in the photo, we can mark the time when this tree first bloomed as weird weather time in the Philippines. 

Consistent with the thinking that — what are flowers for if you cant cut them and bring them inside, I remembered I got these 2 pots on sale and finally their weird shapes made sense as you can see here:  

That night the little yellow flowers opened up exhibiting miniscule and delicate, powdered tip, orange pistils from the hearts of tiny yellow petalled flowers with green pea-looking fruits hanging intermittently along the branches.

Those who saw the pots and the curious bloom were intrigued by them.   After a couple of days, the pea fruits ripened up and turned yellow:

I wanted to know more about the tree but all I found out was that it was planted roughly twenty years ago and that’s about it on the subject.  I tried googling, suspecting it to be a palm (?) but my eyes were all droopy already and me not being anywhere close.  I could keep this post as a draft indefinitely till I get more on this subject but I could also post it and have fun just watching where it goes.  That’s why blogs are so nice. You can do most anything that’s not abusive in it.  Yes, you can even suck at it and it will be quite all right.

Like the cute lollipop Ad says —

 

A pandemic was formally declared today by the WHO.  Alert level 6 refers to the number of countries affected by AH1N1 not the virulence of the virus itself, i.e., mortality rates worldwide in comparison to the BirdFlu which the endcount yielded a million in casualties worldwide.

Filipinos seem to know this instinctively.  If we go by the attendance in Pussycat Doll Concerts attended by 20,000 unmasked, open air concert goers at the huge monster mall — the Mall of Asia; free admittance evening concerts for Independence Day and the Makati (Jejomar “JoJobama” Binay, Makati Mayor for President) mass protests over Constitutional Assembly moves by the lower house leading to the shelving of the measure by its proponent– Malacañang; amid Independence Day political speeches notably by Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Puno where he described this pre-election mood as a “social volcano” and street protests of overseas-based Filipinos in Europe, USA, Australia, etc, etc who are currently encouraged to register for absentee voting in the 2010 elections.

Your Islas Filipinas and mine …blessed with a wonderful heritage, peoples of great heart and tolerance due to cultural diversity, boundless resources, innumerable pearly beaches where a tourist can live like a king on a measly budget — with just one, last, little hitch … extremely lousy governance.