There is always that one person in the family that everybody just quietly agrees is... not okay , you see In our own family, it is my mum’s elder sister Aunty Ini.
See ehn, growing up, we used to fear her more than NEPA ,Anytime she was coming to visit, the whole house would just enter one kind of tension,She never gave warning o ,She would just appear like rapture, dragging her big Ghana Must Go bag, and with that her wig that always looked like it was fighting for freedom lol.....
Yeah.....I remember one time, I was in JSS3 then, she came to visit and brought with her three cats, Yes, three live cats inside a cage, My mum almost fainted. “Ah Ini! What is all this again ?, Why are you moving around with cats?”
She looked at my mum with this very serious face and said, “These are my children now ,I named them Success, Favour, and Breakthrough.”
I swear, even the cats were confused ,lol..
My younger sister whispered, “Mummy, is she okay?”
My Mum just gave him that eye that said, "If you talk again, I will reset your destiny."
But honestly, Aunty Ini was always on a different wavelength, One time, she said she had joined one herbal healing WhatsApp group and started mixing her own creams with bitterleaf, ginger, and coconut water , she rubbed it on her face one night in our house, and by morning, her face looked like yam porridge. Yet she still insisted it was “detox reaction.”
She would cook okra soup and then put one one kind of stuff inside because, in her words, “it balances the soul.” Who told her soul get hungry?
But all jokes aside, as much as she was completely nutty,like nutty as a fruitcake,there was something lovable about her, she never took life too seriously, when we were all stressing about school, money, or life plans, she would just laugh and say, “Life is not beans o.”
And guess what, She danced. Every Saturday morning, she would wake up, play “Sweet Mother” at the loudest volume, and dance in front of our gate with wrapper tied on her chest and headscarf tilted like a crown, even the neighbours gave up on complaining.
We once asked her why she acts the way she does, and she just smiled and said, “If I don’t act mad a little, this country will drive me mad completely.”
Honestly? Maybe she’s right.
See Sometimes I just that think her madness is just her way of coping, like a way to still find joy in the middle of this wahala-filled country.
So yeah you see , Aunty Ini might be nutty as a fruitcake, but she is still our own fruitcake, and truth be told,this life would be very boring without her in it.
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