A Southern Tagalog ghost (and food) story

Where sinigang, pandesal, and one mango tree stirred a childhood memory that still lingers every Undas

- FELICIANO RODRIGUEZ III

OLD HOME The author with his grandfather Osvaldo Custodio and younger cousin Charles Cruz inside the Custodio ancestral house on Zavalla Street in Sta. Rosa, Laguna. The large mango tree is seen outside the window.

A good ghost story chills the blood, pleasurably. This one is no different, except that it is also about food and home, and it happened to me.

It is a privilege to have your own provincial homestead. For us, it was our ancestral house on Zavalla Street in Sta. Rosa, Laguna, where every Halloween the cousins would gather, and childhood would unfold among capiz windows, tinadtad, and tales of the unseen.

Our maternal home stood since the late 1800s, a typical bahay na bato with stone foundations, wooden on the second floor, and capiz windows that filtered sunlight into honey-colored squares. The Custodios lived there for generations, alongside old families like the Tiongcos, the Silvas, the Perlas, the Belizaros, and the Relovas.

At the center of the courtyard rose a mango tree so large its branches reached over the roof like a canopy. It was more than a century old, the heart of the house. Its shadow stretched across our childhoods, marking the seasons, especially those long Undas weeks when everyone came home.

Those were the days that taught us who we were through food. My only sister and I grew up in the city, where we learned to hold cutlery like little diplomats and measure portions the Western way. But in Sta. Rosa, we relearned how to eat with our hands, food placed on banana leaves, with appetite, with joy.

Breakfast meant warm pandesal, still steaming from the panaderia, smelling of toasted flour and brown sugar. My grandfather Osvaldo Custodio would arrive with a brown paper bag balanced on his bicycle handlebar, the aroma of fresh bread trailing behind him.