She prays to the guardian angels of her remembrances.: "Guide me to the lost heartlands. It must be there with the sights, sounds, scents, the intimate taste and feel of what once was my very own arcadia."

Over the years it had vanished slowly, leaving hollow memories, like dry shells bereft of ocean song.

The thick growing bougainvillea still lean on gate posts, as always scattering scarlet flowers on the ground. Around the garden pool mandarin trees drop white petals, and the air is suffused with the scent of oranges.

"Breath deeply for perfumes of the past, to seek the core of joy." But the elusive fragrance will not stay, a ghost in an empty room.

Beyond new roofs of galvanized iron, farther than the Rizal monument grayed and speckled by disaffection, or the church steeple toppled by war, must be the mountains.

When she was a child, she owned the blue green slopes, splashed with sun and silvered by the moon. Nights she listened to the songs of the goddess Makiling, she, who in gossamer white, floated over hills and valleys, mourning an earthly lover.

But the divinities have left, and indifferent mountains have moved to a farther sky.

Tender recollections cannot span a chasm.

But there remains a road, alive with brambles, winding its way to where it all began, and where the heartlands may again turn green.