Up until I was the age of fifteen, I visited my grandparents’ house in the Philippines every summer for two months. During those summers, I would re-learn Tagalog, shower twice everyday, and generally waste my days playing with my cousins.

Some of the best days I had as a child were in that house at 6 Ilagan Street, with the big green gate and the sari-sari store on the corner where I would buy my gumballs and drink Coca Cola from a plastic bag with a straw. I remember wearing tsinelas (flip flops) everywhere, around my grandparents’ house, outdoors, jumping on and off the jeepnies in Quezon City. I still wear them around my house in Canada; it feels weird not to wear them.

Everyday, my sisters and I would wake up to the sound of the rooster, the sun not fully out yet and the air conditioner pumping on high. Although we visited every summer, we were still Canadians at heart, not used to the extreme humidity of the Philippines and comforted by the familiarity of cold blasts of air during the night.

When feeling adventurous, I climbed from the terrace of the house to the rusty roofs with my cousin, running and leaping over the gaps between each sheet of metal, hearing the yayas gossiping underneath and the chickens clucking in the corner of the property. From the roof, we’d try to climb the enormous mango tree that grew in the backyard (if you can call it that, there was no grass to speak of). The messy canopy of leaves and branches had been there longer than I had, longer than my grandparents had, and surely long before cement had been poured over its unyielding roots to a make way for a proper garage. I remember Ovaltine, Tang, and milky coffee in which I dipped my soft pan de sal that was purchased fresh every morning. I tried to make the same drinks in Canada, but they never tasted the same as they did when I would eat at the giant table in my grandparents’ house with two fans buzzing by my face in intervals.

Random parties would take place during the summer, celebrating the birthdays of my sister, cousins, and children I didn’t know or am simply unable to remember now. People would fill the house and spill onto the covered driveway. They would take turns singing karaoke, some warbling out classics, but many with beautiful, powerful voices. We kids looked forward to when my uncle would suspend from the ceiling a collection of toys and candy hanging from a plastic grid. As we threw ourselves up to snatch the tiny dolls and planes, my uncle would laugh as he pulled on the rope connected to the grid, giving some of the taller kids a chance to easily grab what they wanted and leaving the smaller children anxious and annoyed that they couldn’t reach the better prizes.

My grandfather owned a produce business in the Quiapo market and I would visit it sometimes. I remember the hustle and bustle of the market, the many colours of people’s stock and wares, and my grandfather’s old red truck filled with various vegetables. This was before his stroke that left him slow-moving and quiet, when I could still imagine his voice and laugh. I wish I could capture those moments with him in Quiapo, watching him chat with friends and customers, hearing his voice booming through the floorboards as I ran around the empty rooms upstairs chasing a seemingly endless army of stray cats. These memories are how I want to remember my grandfather, loud and smiling and proud.

The house at 6 Ilagan has since been sold, about six years ago. When my parents told me that my grandparents had sold it, for some much needed money, I felt like I had lost not only a piece of my childhood, but an entire branch of my family tree. My grandmother had grown up in that house, as did my mother, her siblings, and the cousins I would play with every summer. Since my days there as a child, many things have changed not only with me, but also with those I knew as family under that rusty metal roof. There has been betrayal, crime, death… My cousins, my earliest best friends, unable or unwilling to leave the Philippines, have gone through rough and tragic times. Things are not so easy anymore—maybe they never were. I was too young to recognize the discontent around me, the whispers of unfamiliar words that I thought I knew back then, but have now lost the tongue to communicate and understand.

I long to go back to 6 Ilagan. But, as an adult, I know and fear that it will not be as I remember it.