[ATTACH=full]36939[/ATTACH] As I age, I am getting in touch with my own mortality.
Recently, in a heart-rending move, I decided to visit the government house I grew up in at the foothills of the Aberdares.
My childhood memories of it were mixed; while I remembered the house as spacious and modern, I also remembered the cold, and Mum’s relentless shock-and-awe wars. She was a teacher from the old school, a bit too harsh.
I remembered eating raw carrots from the shamba until the shit came out red, and endless meals of potatoes and cabbage. I remembered walking into the nearby forest on Sunday to collect wild straw berries, and coming face to face with a hundred elephants.
I had to see that house again, where I grew up all those years ago.
And so I drove the 120 kilometres from Nairobi, down the Kamae forest, to the place where I shed my baby teeth and became a man. I ad not been here for nearly four decades.
The house still stood, barely.
For a while, I learned from a man I met, it had been used as a sheep pen when it became decrepit, until a PEV family was allowed to move in. The kitchen and the store and the bathroom at the back had collapsed. Its window panes were all broken.
Inside, its once cream board walls were dark with soot.
The places where the pictures of my family hung were unrecognisable.
I felt so much emotion I could die.
I remembered the number of times mum had told us not to play in large sitting room , as if we could defile it. The sheep had slept there. I remembered when she told us not to hit the floor with things hard so that we dont crack it. I remembered when she walloped us because we scrawled something with charcoal on the walls. I remembered my cousin, all of 15 years, scrubbing dishes in the kitchen alone at night, scared of the howling of the wind.
I remembered all we did to protect that house, at the pain of an awful thrashing, and I wondered, what was it all for when it had come to this?
Perhaps that’s the nature of life; to have no meaning.