The rain started after midnight and continued into the early morning. It left an ugly day with clouds and a bit of a wind. It is 43°. Today will be a quiet day. It will be a sloth day.
When I was a kid, every weekday was the same. I got up, ate cereal, dressed for school then walked out the door and down the hill. School wasn’t all that far away, mostly it was a straight shot from the bottom of the hill. I never remember being bored back then despite the sameness of every day. Somehow there was always something to fill the time. I used to color at the kitchen table while my mother made dinner. On the table, I had my coloring book and a cigar box, the final resting place for crayons of every length, many without labels, but I didn’t mind the missing labels. I did mind short crayons with blunt ends. Those I tossed.
Weeknight dinners were usually meat and potatoes and a canned vegetable except for Fridays and Saturdays. Friday was meatless so we sometimes had fish sticks and French fries or fried dough, our favorite. On Saturdays we had the traditional hot dogs, beans and brown bread.
My sister had a beef stew for dinner last night. She mentioned mashing the potatoes and carrots together because that was how my mother served them. It was a trick, her way of having us eat carrots. We fell for it every time.
When I was a bit older, I used to love walking home at night. It was always quiet. I remember how circles of lights shining from the windows of the houses closest to the sidewalks lit the way. In the summertime those windows were open, and I could hear the TVs blaring. Somehow it was a comforting sound.
When I lived in Ghana, I loved going to my town at night, usually to buy snacks of some sort as women, aunties, cooked and sold food along the sides of the street. As I rode into town, I could see pockets of light from cooking fires and small lanterns. In between, the street was dark. Some food like Guinea fowl was cooked on screens over charcoal fires burning in huge white metal bowls. Other foods like plantain chips, a favorite, and yam chips were cooked in white bowls of boiling peanut oil also over charcoal fires. Sometimes I could find kelewele, my all time favorite street food. That was serendipitous. I always ate some from the newspaper wrappings on my way home. I could never resist.
