The Scent that Stayed

By Karen Abello

Summer was never exciting for me as a kid. It followed the same slow rhythm, year after year. Most days, I would hang out at my mother’s sari-sari store, trying to entertain myself and thinking of ways to escape the boredom of being stuck at home.

As a child, we live on a small island of Bantayan. There wasn’t much to do in our town except go to the beach, which might sound idyllic but even that was off-limits unless my father wasn’t around and my mother was too occupied with the store. I’d have to convince my friends to sneak out with me for just a glimpse of the shore. So most days, I stayed put and help out at the store rearranging stocks (unless when my parents feel like doing something for the summer, then that means a trip to Cebu). I would build castles out of canned goods and snack packs to my mother’s mild disapproval. Those long, hot afternoons drifted by in a kind of quiet sameness. No beach, no grand adventures, just me napping among the stacks of goods and waiting for the day to end.

Yet amid the uneventfulness of it all, the food vendors made those summers feel worthwhile. I would be stirred from my nap by the smell of freshly baked bibingka wafting through the store’s facade. We’d buy a pack or two and mother would request ours be baked with extra condensed milk. I’d wait patiently smiling to myself, still glancing at the beach I still wasn’t allowed to visit but somehow, that bibingka made everything okay.

Bibingka was also the highlight of our road trips to Cebu. If time allowed, we’d stop in Catmon to buy them from the vendors along the road. Those long drives filled with scenic views of the sea and mountains, music humming through the speakers, and the familiar comfort of warm bibingka felt like I was in a music video.

Writing this far from home, I realise it’s not the big moments that stayed with me the most but the humble and the quiet ones. The repetition of the familiar, be it scent or sound that seem to endure in my memories. Before I left Cebu, my friends and I made one last stop in Catmon. We bought bibingka, of course. I held on to it delicately like clinging on to the present then, and now, it's a memory. In a foreign land where bibingka doesn't exist, it’s bittersweet knowing I may never eat bibingka with my loved ones again. Still, I'd like to think that one day, I’ll come across a scent that would make this new chapter of life just as memorable the way the scent of warm bibingka once did.