MEDIUM RARE

Fire and Ice was a new color invented for a brand of lipstick years ago, when I would’ve been too young to use it.
As my literature teacher might’ve phrased it, the name was a “reconciliation of opposites”— so who wants to kiss ice-cold lips?
This isn’t about lipstick. Look up at the sky and you know we have reached the second half of the year. The flowers of the fire tree say so. Flowers on fire, resisting the rain. In a country where opposites rule, high temperatures caused by the white heat of the sun share space with the usual isolated rainshowers; appropriately fire and rain. Some rain may be good for farmers but not always for fishermen.
For those who neither farm nor fish, the fickle weather is just one of those things that have blessed or cursed us with what is termed a resilient nature. Myself, I love the in-betweenness of things. This is the season, short as it is, when driving out to the campuses of UP Diliman and Ateneo Loyola Heights in Quezon City is a cheap thrill, as does a trip to Forbes Park and BGC, where you pass under clouds of fiery petals during the short time they’re allowed to display their glory. Short-lived their time may be, but if Japan and Korea have their photogenic cherry blossoms that fade and fall away after a few days, our blooms on fire last two to three weeks, a splendorous canopy worthy of a painter’s brush, a photographer’s lens, a poet’s stanzas.
Coming from such a visit, the enthralled admirer imagines what our tourism brochures might look like if, for example, Quezon Memorial Circle’s outermost ring were a 5 km circumference of flame flowers – fire in the sky! Or how lovers at Luneta walk along a path lighted by red-hot flowers – so what if it rains? Romantic, isn’t it, two snugly sharing one umbrella, as K-dramas are fond of portraying.
We don’t have that many fire trees, though, supposedly because they attract termites that prey on wooden houses and furniture. One sector of tree lovers doesn’t like the caballero (its other name), the reason being that it’s not a native, having originated in Madagascar.