Culture

Law-uy sa Ting-uwan

My lola has rain-sense.

Or weather sense, for that matter. Like every farmer who has acquired clairvoyance to everything related to the earth and their crops.

So when she left her farm in Danao to live with us in the city, she brought her rain-sense, farmer-sense with her. She couldn’t part from tinkering with the earth.

She cultivated every free space in our yard and planted them with an amazing variety of edible plants – talong, kamatis, okra, sibuyas, kamote, kamoteng kahoy, ube, gabi, tangad, batong, kamunggay, kalabasa, kangkong, saging, even mais.

She planted neither fancy flowers nor expensive orchids, they were always vegetables, fruits, plants we could pick right off the yard and cook wonders from.

And so when the rains started to pour in, and pour in heavily and lengthily they usually did, there was one hot and delicious cure to the cold melancholia that gushes forth with the rain – my lola’s law-uy. The Tagalog’s sinabawang gulay is no match to our Bol-anong law-uy. And, I daresay, no Bol-anong law-uy could match my lola’s. (Although, Jasper might say the same with his Father’s…)

It is important that you’re vegetables are the freshest, my Lola said when I asked the secret to her law-uy. Wala’y ayu kanang utanong pinalit. Kana gayung inyong kaugalingong abot. (This one is rather hard to follow nowadays.) Ang nakadaut karon karun… tapuwan kaaujo ning mga bag-ong tubo, di na kamao mananum.
Dapat sakto og utanon, kompleto. Importante nga naa’y: kalabasa, gabi, kamatis, gay (camote crops), bago, batong, sibuyas dahon, ug ayaw kalimti ang tangad.

Dili kinahanglan subakan kanunay kay mas lami-an gayud kanang pure. Ajaw palabii og asin. Bantayi nga dili malata. Og labing importante, ajaw vetsin-i.

The instructions seem simple but no one could replicate the exact taste of Lola’s law-uy, served steaming and delicious during midday downpours, when it is pouring outside and inside, too, when huge beads of sweat start trickling endless down your forehead after finishing a full bowl of the scrumptious vegetable soup.

At ten in the morning, when the sun shone brightly as ever, when there was still no slightest sign of rain, Lola would gather from her garden the ingredients she would need for her law-uy, and start chopping, cutting, snapping the vegatables at the kitchen table. By eleven, when she starts boiling water, the skies already tell signs of coming rain.

It is already drizzling a bit when she starts pouring in the first vegetables onto the boiling water. And by the time, the tangad is dipped in with the rest, the endless silver ropes from heavens are now slamming hard on the earth, the streets now shallow rivers, canals, gushing creeks.

We delight in the midday rains, where inside our home, we gather ‘round the dining table, ‘round steaming bowls of law-uy, treasured blessings from my lola and from Mother Earth, the ultimate creator of the rains and the ever delicious law-uy.

(June 24, 2007)

Tags: bohol, filipino dish, food, rain, rainy season, soup