Howdy friends and lovers of laughter. Again, I come prepared to laugh and crack some ribs. I know I will enjoy the visit here as I hope you will enjoy my blog. I welcome y'all.
Mahn! I must have been brought up in a comic setting. I thank the village life for these memories. Our village comes with a package of cold air that makes it a natural refrigerator. Although the air is cold, we are blessed with enough sunlight to dry our firewood, and when it's freezing, we use the drying shelf above the hearth. Gas was history. Our gas was the charcoal stove, the wick-type kerosene stove or the sawdust stove. The sawdust stove was fun to start because it gave us a chance to raid and stomp the stove with our feet.
First, it was my grandma with her fridge gift. Her daughter, my aunt, had gifted her a small fridge when she upgraded. There's this week when she cooked Githeri (our staple food, made by boiling a mixture of maize and beans) and then stored it in the fridge. In the course of that same week, I went to her house just as she was preparing to make dinner. She took that opportunity to send me.
"Tabby, can you please go get me Githeri from the fridge."
"Sure Shosh (grandma)," I said as I left the kitchen.
I had never before checked her fridge until that day. I opened the fridge, and I was like, pullooop! I closed it to make sure I hadn't confused it with the cupboard. Then I opened it again and, wueh, I was met by a soot-covered sufuria that had painted the fridge black with soot.
"Ah, Shosh jamenii! Hizi ni mawhat? (oh, grandma, c'moon! What on earth is this?)" I couldn't help myself as I stared and laughed. I must have stayed there for a while because she called out from the kitchen, "Tabby! What's taking you forever?"
"I'm coming Shosh," I replied, regaining composure. No, no, I didn't bring it up (hehe).
Then came my father's lighter. Oh, I am not talking about the normal lighter. Ah, ah! I am talking about Mama's upgrade to the gas cooker. After her chama had finished buying them the small cylinder, they upgraded to the 13kg cylinder. This came with a twin-burner tabletop stove with auto-ignition.
Whenever my father was tipsy and needed to light a cigarette and didn't have a match box or lighter to do so, he'd send one of us to bring him a burning stick from the kitchen. Then Mama brought his savior home. Haha, this maan. When he discovered that the stove didn't need a matchbox or a lighter to use, he activated his inner child. He'd rush over, drunkenly, to the twin-burner stove, turn the ignition, and light his cigarette. Ah, this made Mama so angry that it was hilarious...
"Ah, ah! So now you want to finish my gas and burn the house down in the process?" She started. She went on to pull out her if cards. She pulled out her ifs to the point of disconnecting the gas connection hose (hehe). "This will not be the reason we will go homeless because of cigarettes," she said with as she stormed out with the hose.
Later on, I told her, "Mom, you could have just turned off the regulator. I'm sure Pops wouldn't have noticed."
Thank you for reading馃槉.
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