Monday, June 02, 2008 Summer of the paper crane By Letecia Suarez-Orendain
WITH the first pitter-patter of summer rain came the little children.
Eleven-year-old Ajill and her brother, nine-year-old Kee, spent the whole summer with their grandparents who live in a mountain barangay in Cebu City.
With open doors, the old folks welcomed the children into their spacious home and hearts.
The house was too big for the old folks and oh, a stray cat that would drop by from time to time. With the children, the house at once seemed to be peopled by a happy crowd.
Even if children are God’s treasures and in fact considered in Proverbs as God’s inheritance, the Cebuano, ever the rascal, has a humorous idiom assigned to them — bunga sa singot sa kaadlawon or literally “fruit of dawn’s perspiration.”
Indeed, children are the labor of their parents’ love or what remains of this unique human feeling after years of marriage or cohabitation.
Grandma Lilith was aware of how precious children are, which is why she handled Ajill and Kee with a steward’s concern for what the master will say.
She and her husband had been entrusted a great treasure. As stewards, it was their duty to provide them the cornucopia of life: good food and accommodations, and good memories to take to adulthood.
Grandma designed the days to be filled with color and laughter. She taught them how to use crayons and taught them the art of paper folding (origami).
For many days she saw them through the difficult process of making a flapping bird, which looks like the Japanese crane, or tsuru.
It’s a brilliant design — a simple toy that also functions as decoration. It provides so much joy. When a child pulls the tail of the paper bird, like magic the wings flap in freedom.
Paper is relatively cheap. A child’s laughter and delight are priceless. And so grandma told them not to fear ruining their paper bird because of their clumsiness and lack of experience.
Grandma told them: “It took me a long time to learn how to fold a tsuru and a flapping bird all by myself. I learned it from a book. Now you have a teacher.
“Don’t be afraid of making a mistake. It is just paper. We have a lot of old newspapers to use for practice. What’s important is you learn how to make a flapping paper bird. Then I will let you use the special papers I have.”
After two days, Ajill and Kee managed to make a passable flapping bird.
Grandma saw the children’s pride of their handiwork: a crumpled bird with wings uneven and beak misshapen. For her it was a successful project and so she made no comment on how it looked.
What mattered was that they mastered their fear of paper as they learned the art of paper folding. The children were true to the required lines and folds, and learned to gain peace through origami.
In contrast, Kee loved the tsuru more but because it was too daunting to make, grandma redirected him to one of the simplest origami shapes — a house.
Ajill instantly liked the paper houses, which she decorated by pasting on doors, windows, trees and flowers she cut from colored paper.
She even drew a complete living room on the backside of the paper houses.
The girl created a whole village, which she laid out on the living room floor.
“Momie Lilith, would you like to live in one of the houses?” she asked her grandma whom she addresses as “momie.”
“Indeed, I will,” grandma replied.
Other origami objects started to bloom on the floor — jumping frogs, fans, purses — but the flapping bird was memorable.
Grandma hopes that the brilliant colors of the tsuru and the flapping birds would brighten the days of Ajill and Kee as they leave childhood and master the art of adulthood.
