Our second house was made of wood, with G.I. roofing instead of nipa roof, and bamboo walls, wooden floor instead of bamboo, and it had a place for bathing called BANGSAL. Later on it had a separate toilet, too, far from our house proper, inside our yard.
In this new house we had a real dining room and a large table with wooden benches instead of mere stools. The roof did not leak and it had lesser centipedes or scorpions compared to our nipa hut, but it still had flies, cockroaches, house lizards, and mosquitoes.
Later on we had running water piped to our BANGSAL and no longer carried water from the distant well. We also had electric light installed in this house, and where father could sew slippers at night time.
We even used our dining table to play ping pong. Since the house had ten steps and our stairs were wooden instead of bamboo, it had a space under the floor for storing rice, corn, and tobacco from the farms Mother inherited.
But still we could not avoid having mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, house lizards, spiders, bed bugs, fleas, and ants. It seems as though these vermin were parts of every house, just like lice or mites were parts of our hair then.
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