In the Philippines, we learn to sense a storm before it arrives. We know the difference between amihan and habagat, between the dry gust that lingers and the southwest monsoon that soaks everything in its path. We are fluent in storm jargons. Ask any taxi driver, “May bagyo kaya, Kuya?” and he’ll answer like a weather forecaster: “Low pressure lang po, Ma’am.” We can read the storm signals from the dag-im, the sudden darkening of the sky.
Even as children, we knew the signs. In elementary school, we listened for the number codes from PAGASA: Signal Number 3 meant no classes, storm conditions were serious. These days, the warnings are color-coded instead. “Orange” now signals intense rainfall rather than strong winds, a shift born from the hard lessons of Typhoon Ondoy, when rainfall, not wind, was the greater danger
Everyone Has a Flood Story
No matter which island we call home, flooding has become part of our national memory. Back home in Batangas, floodwaters used to stroll down from Capitolio and P. Burgos Highway, pooling in Vergara Street like water in a basin.
Inside our two-story, 54-square-meter apartment, Inay, would install her windbreakers. As the weather turned, she would secure the masiteras with ropes so they wouldn’t topple and scatter her plants across the cement. Then she’d unfold a stack of cleaned, repurposed plastic, old shower curtains and packaging sheets, and, with her matching clips and cords, begin to cover the open veranda. She knew exactly where to fold and tie, which way the wind would pull. In just a few minutes, she could fortify the veranda against the onslaught of wind and rain.
Housekeeper
After I left full-time editing, I converted our bedroom upstairs into my home office, my nook of organized chaos: I had my PC, server, paper files, a revolving chair, family photos glued to the wall, a riff-raff organizer on the closet door, and pictures of family to cheer me through deadlines. Often, as I worked at my narra desk with my back to a wall of filing cabinets and seven-tier bookshelves,
Inay would roll across the linoleum floor (every morning, in her DIY rolling board), dusting, waxing with her rags. I remember that we fought over it more times than I can count. “I can’t concentrate with all this scrubbing and that strong wax smell,” I’d protest. But Inay kept cleaning.
When she could still walk barefoot and feel the grit of dust, she would say, “Marumi ’pag makati.” It’s dirty when your feet itch, but not on her watch
That Floating Box of Rags
Inay had an obsession with rags. Back then, I rolled my eyes at the box she kept near the stairs. It contained no random pieces of cloth, but rags cut from old kamiseta, squared pieces of used-garments categorized by purpose, folded perfectly, and stacked by size. She had rags for the floor, the shelves, the wooden stairs, the floor tiles, the jalousies, the ref, the stove, the sink. We could immediately tell from the taxonomy of cloth which rags to wet and which to use dry. And she lined the rag box with plastic to protect them.
So one day, when the rains fell hard and floodwaters rose from the street and entered our home…
I woke up, and barefoot, stepping into water, I froze. Not in panic, but instead, I was struck by something odd: the water was crystal clear. There were no floating house debris, no dead insects, no slimy film of dirt. Even the box of rags had risen in the water like a little life raft, its contents untouched. The corners of the house, the nooks my mother waxed every morning while I groaned, was like a calm beach. There were no cockroaches. No mice. Not a floating plastic anywhere.
Strategic Housekeeping
Inay had a gift for homekeeping that went far beyond neatness. She understood how to create spaces where everything had a purpose. Her flood-preparedness didn’t come from textbooks or emergency response pamphlets. It came from her familiarity with the weather, from touching the floor barefoot, from knowing that dirt in corners turn to clay, from battling the persistent webbing of dust.
In that instance of the flood, (I can’t remember the name of the typhoon) I recall seeing my toes beneath the surface, visible under water. As I scooped the water with tabo and timba, I thought that this flood respected my mother’s house.
In Filipino homes, we often speak of our mothers as self-sacrificing, but how much do we appreciate their day-to-day operational brilliance? Inay’s plastic-lined rag box, her rotation of cleaning zones, the built-in fixtures in tight spaces, everything was risk management. My mother’s insistence on wiping every surface, folding every rag, and organizing every tool wasn’t just about tidiness, but foresight. Cleanliness, for her, was a system for staying ahead of disruption.
Above the Flood Waters
Now, years later, I live in a higher space where hopefully flood waters can’t reach. Inay has long retired (RIP) from her arduous floor waxing and cleaning. But I have inherited the rag-sorting, cutting and recycling used clothes, t-shirts, shorts into usable dusters. Every rag cutout has a specific task. I fold them cleanly and stack them in a clean, well-padded box. I have little tolerance for a rag left and tossed in the wrong corner. And as I learned from Inay, I know the floor tiles are dirty when my bare foot walks on it and feels the grit and grime.
I don’t romanticize my mother’s routines, because she herself was pragmatic about her cleaning methods, but I can’t underplay my life insight: clarity, of water, of space, of thought, stems from early, diligent and deliberate preparation of the smallest, plainest, oddest details. There was wisdom in a padded box of dry rags, and It was a marvel seeing it floating on clear flood waters.
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