As I walked from the kitchen to the dining and the sitting room in the mornings, I get glimpses of the individual rooms of tenants as they move in or out. Since the chief tenant and I would use the public space at will, I wonder what it felt like to be confined to a 10x12 feet room outside of class or work time? Most of them, I notice, eat their meals in their individual rooms.
In comparison, I am fortunate to have the space of 30x65 feet in Sabah even though the work and bed rooms cover perhaps one third of that area. In spite of the fact that the landlady's miscellaneous equipment for a defunct restaurant and a thriving catering business is scattered outside of the two little rooms, it is still wonderful to have the run of the entire first floor except for the daily visit of the landlady in adding or retrieving ingredients from the deep chest freezers for her business. She cooks either in her apartment or her sister's big wooden house in the outskirts of the city. The same sister rears 200 chickens for sale all around the spacious house. Their 82 year old mother, still plants and harvests vegetables for sale, lives next door to the said sister. Talk about the long and active lives of the seniors living in the land below the wind.
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