After all, dreams are free and boundless, aren’t they?

“For me, marble for everything, like the walls inside and outside, and most of all, the floors,” one of the two Filipinas from across my seat in the No. 10 bus outlined in crescendo; she would have to tear down the hut she grew up in, she said, by a creek—and the surrounding rice fields her father once farmed as tenant, two hectares of which the family now owns, not far from Maharlika Highway in the Science City of Munoz, Nueva Ecija.

She continued, revealing that she had borrowed the brilliance of marble from a Roman villa; before coming to Vancouver, she worked as a domestic in Milan, where she had polished walls and floors of “carrara marble daw mga ‘yon, mare,” rolling her r’s as she slightly slapped her friend’s arm, as if sensing in her friend’s knitted forehead a query, she quickly added, “para sa akin, ‘yun lang galing sa Romblon, di ka na mabiro.”

“Capiz windows para sa akin,” the other countered, as wide as the old houses she used to pass by in their town in Iloilo, but especially, the landowner’s of the farms her father tilled. And did her seatmate remember the lace-like edgings of carved wood on the roof and the ceiling? She wanted that, too. Not to mention, of course, wide floorboards and a winding staircase with barandilla, that would really make her mother happy, she, who really mourned as if this daughter on leaving for Canada sort of died.

They talked of double-lined curtains with valances. One even mentioned duvet covers common here in Vancouver—in this, I wanted to butt in to remind them how much heat such fancies generate. But it was my stop. I had glanced them as I pushed the door open still wrapped in the mist of their dreaming.

I wondered how long it would take them to walk into their dream home, where others have already materialized, as in Bulacan and Nueva Ecija along the highway—in my trips long ago in a job at the then-National Media Production Center’s Agrarian Reform Communications Unit, I had wakened to glorious dawns break in lyrical shades on spans of rice fields, now an idyll fractured by jagged geometric shapes of subdivision housing.

While it turns out, in the end, that such conversion has helped solve, even if partly, the housing problem that came with population boom, farmers, who now manage their own, have lamented what has become a source of national anguish, namely, the shrinking rice fields, hence, of rice production. With increased requirement for power, too, water sources have been dredged, affecting irrigation systems, as well, ruined a rich ecological balance they once knew—field frogs and mudfish today jump only in our memories.

And yet, a dream, never mind if borrowed from an alien ideal, as always, wins out. How long can it be sustained, though? From fragments of conversations with Juliet, nourishing the dream proves to be as Sisyphean a struggle as realizing it.

She cites the house she had financed in San Pedro, Laguna, with savings from a factory job in Winnipeg, then later after a course, as care aide in hospitals; in her sibling’s hands, it once beckoned like a flashing light on her marine dusk. At her last dinner with us, she had sworn not to go home—mortgage on the property, which would be her sibling’s responsibility has so bloated they could lose it.

Their growing-up years as farming children, for her, have long receded, though sometimes off guard, she would recount how her mother had scrambled through soon-to-be harvested fields covered in Mayon’s ash, screaming to the heavens, why? That’s when her father just received his Certificate of Land Transfer—on their own, working on the farm. With most of the assistance and infrastructure promised in PD 27 like smoke forever, her brothers, who took over, had caved in.

Meanwhile, Rebecca has stopped her daily trips to the Thrift Store for estate sales of Waterford crystal, English porcelain, and Swiss lace doilies, meticulously dressing up a dream home like those of a European lady’s she once cared for; the title of the land on which would rise her dream for her siblings and their children, for which she has sent money, to this day after 10 years, according to her brother, is still “being processed.”

She has been pouring out her dusks and weekend mornings instead, into a veggie patch under the back balcony of her apartment, tending summer seedlings. “Incorrigible farmer,” friends call her, this daughter then, when Marcos’s Agrarian Reform Law promised life, especially to her father; wracked by TB, he had thought a miracle had opened the heavens in Pulangi, Camarines Norte, maybe with a son who struggles to this day.

After all, dreams, especially of a miracle, are free and boundless, aren’t they? Indeed, though as brief as a puff of smoke, and dwell in the moment, could rise even if only in words, like I’ve seen between the two Filipinas seated from across me in the bus.