Espinely

 is-pi-ne-li

Named after the wife of a Judge, one of the prominent people in Calatagan Batangas

Every Christmas eve we always find time to visit my hometown, to have a family get together, update each other and specially share new knowledge with each other. Age brackets became the separator after dinner, adult male in the terrace drinking cold beers and munching finger foods, middle aged women were in the nipa hut or sometimes in the kitchen sharing never ending stories about how they discipline their children and lecture them how life was back then. While we, the teenagers held our sessions on the master’s bedroom. We chat with each other, watched movies together, play card games and sometimes teach each other new skills. Every time we talked there was one word that was always present in a particular topic. Espinely.“Before our school Christmas party we bought new clothing from Espinely, We bought a blouse from Espinely for Lola’s birthday.” Upon hearing those words I came up with the thinking that Espinely was a clothing store, a dress shop. The description of how Espinely looked like as told by my cousins and friends that it was a huge store of pure clothing in cheap prices. First time I visited Espinely was last May, it was not like what I have expected from there stories. I’ve expected a huge building filled with clothing, different colors, fitting rooms, and lastly the scent of new clothes. When I saw the place, I quickly thought that inside would be spacious; it was about half size of a regular of house you can find in Avida housing, dust surrounded the place. As I went in, all I can see was dark colors really far from what I have imagined. Above the shelves were few hanged clothes and the rest was piled all over the ledge. I asked how are you going to pick your desired clothing. My slightly annoyed companion answered me "you will tell them what particular clothing you want (eg. shirt, blouse etc.) then they will give you samples and you are to pick in that samples." It was far like buying clothing in a department store, it was probably the old fashioned way. But as I recall the stories of my cousins they were more than contented from what they bought. People are contented from what they have, one of the reasons why I chose Calatagan, Batangas as my hometown. *

As I questioned the sales lady on how the store name Espinely was derived, she told me that Espinely was not the name of the store. Espinely was the owner of the store the real name of the store was Boutique Habiller, a French term for dress shop. It was hard hard to pronounce and hard to spell so the townspeople end up calling the store Espinely.