What I learned from my lola Marina
My lola Marina Reyes Antonio, wife of National Artist for Architecture Pablo Antonio, was a woman who lived her 96 years with passion and purpose. The loves of her life were her family, fashion, flowers, food and, most importantly, faith.
When my lola Marina was a child, their family was abandoned by her father, and she went to live with her paternal grandparents for many years. Her grandmother Kayang Reyes taught her how to pray in Spanish. Thus, early on, she learned not just a new language but also how to have faith.
I believe this faith was the source of the hope and optimism that enabled my lola not just to survive, but to thrive and flourish in the midst of the challenges that came her way. This is the most important lesson I got from my lola Marina, and not something she taught me outright. I learned it just by seeing how she lived her life—bustling around her home, taking care of her family, immersing herself in her sewing, her gardens, and her kitchen.
Since she lived next door to me, I grew up exploring her gardens, baking in her kitchen, and watching her layer wedding gowns in boxes with tissue paper and dried strips of gugo bark. I remember being fascinated by the creatures in the fish ponds, my lola standing beside me as I taught myself to bake with a Betty Crocker cookbook, and trying my hand at making those hand-rolled roses she was famous for. My lola taught not by explaining, but by example. And many decades later, Marina Antonio wedding gowns, which had been packed with tissue and those brown strips of gugo, emerged from their boxes in pristine condition.
My lola’s mother, Adriana del Rosario, made sure all her daughters learned to sew and to cook because with those skills, they could survive in any situation. I never met her, but my great-grandmother was a good teacher. She must have been the one to guide her daughters to shop for small pieces of kamote because they were cheaper, or to use lowly produce like breadfruit. But these, through a slow and careful process of cooking, yielded candied camote and rimas, which tasted like expensive marron glacé. So I, too, learned that it isn’t necessary to have expensive ingredients to produce something very delicious, or the specialties my lola was famous for.
This same thriftiness and frugality applied to her sewing. Scraps of expensive organdy didn’t go to waste, but were turned into those famous hand-rolled roses. No doubt they were inspired by the rosal that grew in her garden. The sampaguita, another flower she loved, she recreated using satin ribbons. Bride after bride felt their gowns were incomplete unless they had Marina’s roses and sampaguita. Since the sampaguita dangled from the gowns, they had the charming effect of movement as you walked.
I learned from my lola the delights of the garden all my life. In my 30s, she invited me to live with her, and I did—until I got married.
Dama de noche scented the air when my husband was courting me back then. My lola’s gardens, an oasis in the midst of urban Pasay City, have been home to squirrels, turtles, and all kinds of birds. I didn’t exactly inherit my lola’s green thumb, but fortunately, the gardens in my own home manage to thrive. Looking out the windows to see all that greenery is very soothing to the soul.
I felt that the lessons I learned from my lola were worth sharing with the world, so I put them in a book entitled Love Marina, co-published by Far Eastern University. She was, after all, a Reyes who spent her childhood with FEU founder Nicanor Reyes as a playmate. Lourdes Montinola is my lola’s first cousin.
When we launched the book in a very private, family affair at Manila House in early December, it was my daughter Hannah Barrera who gave the closing remarks. She is the fourth-generation fashion designer in the family after Marina Antonio, Malu Veloso, my sister Letlet, and me. She recently exhibited her graduating collection from Benilde at the prestigious Piattaforma Fashion Graduate Italia show in Milan.
Hannah exhorted her Antonio cousins, all fellow great-grandchildren, to do with excellence whatever they were called to do in life.
“When we do our work well,” said Hannah, “Lola Marina lives on in us.”
Love Marina is available at Vicky Veloso-Barrera’s Tiny Kitchen, the FEU bookshop at the university and online, and at Tesoro’s Pasay Road. Apart from the fashion pages, it has gardening tips, thirty-four recipes, and a section by Jeeves on how to care for your fashion pieces. It is retailing at P2,500.
