Hey fam, what's gwan
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been getting very involved in the kitchen…refining and re-tuning my significantly accomplished cooking skills. Anyway, that’s not the direction this post was headed…
So one day, I’ve just seasoned and boiled some amazing-looking chicken parts and prepping them for frying. I’m just about popping them in the air fryer when it strikes me how far along we’ve come with the simple everyday things we’re now accustomed to. I recall Lolo straining and leaning far back from a frying pan over a hot stove flame to avoid hot oil splashes whenever she had to fry chicken or meat back then. These days, we just plug in the air fryer, set a timer and leave it to all work itself out.
It got me thinking back to our childhood and so many specific instances of how life has advanced and how much easier things are now.
Now whenever, I get in the bathtub and turn on the shower or wash plates from a running tap in the kitchen, I recall going out every evening with a contraption called ‘’ifami’’ (a hollowed out rubber bag, with a significant length of twine or rope tied to a loop on the top) to the insanely deep well in our compound to fetch water in basins/buckets and lug them back to the house daily to ensure that there was water in the house for our daily needs. This routine became so ingrained with families in the compound then, that the well became a sort of meeting and gisting point for all the youngins back then. Na wa o.
Related to the above and a bit gross, whenever I push the flush button after taking a pee in the loo, I wince whenever I remember that sometimes back then, we never considered doing so unless there was nothing solid in the bowl to get rid of. (Or when the smell had started overpowering the cheap air fresheners).
I chuckle whenever I use the vacuum cleaner to hoover up the house now and remember using our broom (usually the stiff midribs of dried palm fronds, all bunched together) to sweep our always dusty carpet in the living room and other rooms in the house back then. Bruh, those brooms were stressful as fuck. You had to keep pausing to hit the tops back together and ensure that the whole thing hadn’t come apart from whatever string held them together. Nnamdi almost made a career of sweeping the parlour with those things on Saturday mornings..lmao
Similar memories of hours-long Saturday washing and rinsing sessions with piles of clothes from all comers bunched up together waiting to be hand-washed in basins and buckets re-surface and now clash with the simple act of throwing them all in a fabric-softener-infused washing machine to do laundry nowadays.
It also amuses me how quickly the mortar and pestle became obsolete kitchen tools. At some point, we even used to make eba in them (Ohhh.. the memories).. Fill the mortar with hot boiling water, sprinkle several handfuls of garri evenly to ensure minimised lumping/clumps, set a kitchen stool behind and sit down, then grab the pestle and commence the hard work of pounding the whole mixture together (while hoping our itinerant Landlady, ‘’Up-Mummy’’ doesn't start complaining about the noise). There’s this special technique that only experience can give you for making Eba this way. You have to know when to pause pounding and give the whole thing a quick, heavy-handed swirl with the pestle as a lever…I can’t explain it.. Nowadays, we have mechanized pounders, Ninja-branded machines, and Buchimix contraptions that you can’t even tell what they’re to be used for. As an aside, we absolutely hated washing the mortar after this. There would be holes in the wood, which would contain remnants of whatever was pounded and these were just gross to get out.
A couple of weeks ago, since it was a bit slow draining, I poured a full bottle of solution to unclog our kitchen sink. Really effective stuff. I recall our wastewater dispersal method back then in Adeite and laugh my ass off. There was a special white (initially white but now browned from long use) reconverted paint bucket which we would scoop all the dirty water from the sink and then have to trudge outside the house to get rid of in the open gutter in front of the house. Mahn!!
Of course, all these instances are ultra-specific to me and my personal experiences while growing up.
Change is always constant and growth is to be expected. However, the point of this mid-day rant was just to reminisce on nostalgic days back and recall that you can’t discount progress and how easy it has made life for us all.
Our kids will read this one day and will only be able to imagine scenarios like these.
