My sister was many years older than I, with a battalion of boys between us. I was therefore the only girl she could reach down to whenever necessary. After the wedding, came her first baby. My parents sent me to help my sister with her new baby. She already had a hired House Help but I was the additional help, at least for that month while schools were out. People talk of culture shock when they travel out of the country, mine happened when I visited my sister.
First off, I wondered how my sister could live in a house bigger than our OlKalou home that housed almost ten people. Did my parents know about this? Before reaching the house, I walked under a canopy of huge Jacaranda trees that lined the tarmac road leading to her house, their delicate lavender flowers shedding on the road, it looked like somebody had scattered them there to impress me on my arrival. Mission accomplished. I was in total awe. I had never seen such beauty before, solely provided by mother nature herself. Then there was the beautiful, compact, well trimmed cypress fence, so thick even a chicken could not go through it. My mother is the one who needed this kind of fence to keep out the chickens that keeps digging up her potatoes in her kitchen garden.
Anyhow, my sisters house was a beautiful mansion that even had a chimney. Don’t ask me why but I always associated chimneys with class and wealth. The lawn was beautifully manicured it resembled a golf course, not that I had ever seen one. Walking up her driveway before reaching the front door, there were a few wide steps that led to a huge front porch, I could image sitting there watching the traffic flow on the highway.
The front door was made of mostly glass. I had never seen anything like it before. I always thought doors and windows were made of solid wood like majority of the homes I knew in OlKalou. I was wrong.
