matrimonial bliss. Another superstition says that one can go into the forests and pick and eat any fruits one might like, but never carry any of them home. In doing so, one runs the risk of angering Maria Makiling. One would get lost and be beset by insect stings and thorn pricks. The only solution is to throw away the fruit and then to reverse one's clothing as evidence to Maria that one is no longer carrying any of her fruit. Turning ginger into gold Perhaps the most common "full" story is that of Maria turning ginger into gold to help one villager or the other. In these stories, Maria is said to live in a place known to the villagers and interacts with them regularly. The villager in question is often either a mother seeking a cure for her ill child or a husband seeking a cure for his wife. The wise Maria recognizes the symptoms as signs not of disease, but of hunger brought about by extreme poverty. She gives the villager some ginger, which, by the time the villager gets home, has magically turned to gold In versions where the villager is going home to his wife, he unwisely throws some of the ginger away because it had become too heavy to carry. In some versions, the villagers love her all the more for her act of kindness. In most, however, greedy villagers break into Maria's garden to see if her other plants were really gold. Distressed by the villager's greed, Maria runs away up the mountain, her pristine white clothing soon becoming indistinguishable from the white clouds that play amongst the trees on the upper parts of the mountains. Spurned lover In many other stories, Makiling is characterized as a spurned lover. In one story, she fell in love with a hunter who had wandered into her kingdom. Soon the two became lovers, with the hunter coming up the mountain every day. They promised to love each other forever. When Maria discovered that he had met, fell in love with, and married a mortal woman, she was deeply hurt. Realizing that she could not trust townspeople because she was so different from them, and that they were just using her, she became angry and refused to give fruits to the trees, let animals and birds roam the forests for hunters to catch, and let fish abound