There used to be a nature's haven in our backyard.
There were birds, flowers, sometimes snakes who thrived on tall grasses, and some acacia trees.
It was a prairie, once a rice field, and there is a creek during rainy days which produced some live shells.
During rainy season, the water would cover this lowland like a small lake which some of my friends and neighbors loved to go fishing.
Some small fishes could give us joy and even provide viand for small families.
There's only one thing: it's not ours.
The small piece of land adjacent to it, and where our bungalow now stands, is what me and my wife have strive hard to pay all these years.
We settled in this place with my young family then.
The children were aged seven, eight, and eleven and thirteen, beautiful kids whom I adore the way I adored this nature's haven.
They loved to play in the fields, and I loved seeing them dancing in the rain or playing with the water like they were in "Water World" (although I sometimes pretended calling them to come inside and stop what they were doing because they might catch cold).
This stage of nature is part of their young and growing minds.
I didn't want it gone in an instance merely to give in to the greed and avarice of some subdivision developer.
Now, me and my wife are past fifty, we'll soon have a grandchild, thank God, and our nature's haven is gone except pipes and subdivision roads and a signboard that says "Royale", something.
For a while, it lay there dormant.
The birds came hopping and crazy of their abode.
Some of them would even enter my house; they flew and played wherever they wanted.
Nobody cared.
Nobody killed the birds.
The subdivision owner must have thought that nature is more precious than gold.
Well, it wasn't so.
He was away for some precious ten years or more, looking for capital.
My kids have grown up, two are starting their own families, and they're asking, "What happened to our prairie?" The capitalist found gold somewhere, came back to flatten the fields, cut the grasses and trees, cover the creek, and the machines and trucks came howling gravel and sand.
Presto, a new community to spoil the fields and nature is in the offing.
The birds couldn't find where to lay their nests on.
The snakes scampered to nowhere, a rather fat one became a delicacy, and my field is gone.
Our prairie is turning into a community, God knows they won't even care where the creek is, and where the birds and the snakes are.
The rich capitalist becomes a few times richer.
He goes to other lands to find some rice fields to be converted again.
The farmer goes to the city to spend his money.
People get lazy, are lured by a few thousand pesos.
What happens is that they add to the growing number of poor who do not have anything to eat.
Meanwhile, it's getting hotter in here.
The rain is not anymore safe for the children.
The birds have gone to nowhere.
Water becomes stagnant; there is no proper drainage, the subdivision has stopped the natural law - that water seeks its own level.
Instead, there will be much flooding come rainy days.
This is life, the modern way.
We know now what happens when we alter the ways of nature.
Floods, typhoons and cyclones come in handy.
When we add the spoilers such as carbon dioxide and gas emissions, climate change and global warming happen.
And then there will be less water to drink (but more floods), less trees and less life.
Worst? Less food.
We have been looking for answers, researching on why all of this is happening.
It's simple there, in my backyard, the answer is out in the open - it's all about property and greed.
Can we bring these to our grave? Perhaps that subdivision owner can bring it to his.
Probably he'll be an owner of a big lot in the after-life.
Main time, we suffer for his greed.
We live lacking of everything, and overflowing of calamities.