Nevergirl’s

Before we moved, the most strenuous thing I ever did with my hands was hammer away at the keyboard. I spent afternoons napping, pounding away on the laptop, or meeting up with girl friends. I do not cook, clean, or do the laundry… but please do not think I’m a wife who does nothing but spend her husband’s money because I’m not. I work harder than anyone I know. I work til my eyes cross and sometimes, I don’t sleep for three days straight just to make sure we launch a product on time. But well, all that work, it’s mostly mental. At the end of each work week, it’s just my eyes, brain, and fingers that hurt.

But oh how things have changed!

No, my work hasn’t changed. I still run the same company for the same boss. However, I help out with the farm and mill work, too, and this is how it came to pass that I spent an entire afternoon counting rubber seedlings and helping haul them onto a ten-wheeler. By the time I finished counting and re-counting 3,128 rubber seedlings, my back hurt worse than it ever did my whole life, and my long, newly manicured fingernails looked like I ran them through a cheese grater before dipping them in mud. It’s not easy living here, I tell you! Right now, Wett and I will each give a kidney for massage tables we can plunk ourselves into.

These are rubber seedlings of the five-year variety. They are from Makilala. They’re being hauled onto a ten-wheeler so they can be transported to the farm early tomorrow morning, where they will be left to grow in peace. After five years, they can be tapped into all-year-round for the next 30 years. Yep, you can harvest latex every day for a quarter of a century, and these babies won’t groan. We do not sell rubber, though. At least, that’s not the plan. The plan is to put up a plant where we can manufacture latex products, mostly mattresses. Until that happens, the man and I will be traveling to Bukidnon to check out latex plants and see how things work. This early, I dread the dust and the bumpy roads. In case you’ve never heard me whine about this before, let me whine about this again: traveling to the remote areas of Mindanao sucks vacuum cleaners. You will be tossed this way and that, like salad. You will also end up inhaling so much dust it wouldn’t surprise anyone if you end up lugging a nebulizer, like me.

If you happen to be a friend who’s freaked out that I now know something about plant life, don’t worry. I’m just as freaked out by this development as you. Before this, the closest I ever got to plant life was watering the plants in my grandmother’s garden in the rare summers we spend at our maternal grandparents’!

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