Hello Traveller passing through, how do you do?
And what do you do with your days?
Me? I am making a cake.
The good thing about this cake is that you can gorge on chunks of it but it ain’t gon make you gain size sideways. It might make you giddy but you won’t test with likker in your blood stream.
WARNING!
This cake ain’t a typical baked goody.
It’s a confusion of tastes that would twast your tongue.
It’s sweet and sour.
Bitter, sugary and salty.
Heavy with sadness yet light with laughter drifting up and away.
Every time you sink your teeth into a thick slice of this creamy, gritty confection, strange images will rise up in your mind the way Alice saw things when she sipped and ate in Wonderland.
What you gon see? Magic and jumbies whipped together with grams of reality in humdrum homes. The sun gon rise and the white-grey mist of rain-coming gon stir in the light. You gon see brown mud scattered with crimson petals and you gon hear foreign accents, tears dripping and jokes. The creatures of the night, they walk by day, yet day-time critters are as common as crapaud…that big-fat toad that makes girls of GY holler-an’-screel with horror when they spot one in the yard. They ain’t kissing dah to find no prince, yeah!
But don’t fret-up y’self, there ain’t no psychedelic substances in this-here cake although the contents might change your mind about people and places.
Awww, for goodness’ sake, I should quit the dramatics. It’s words I’m talking about, my friend, the words I’m working on and stories I’m planning to serve up. But can’t we, just for fun, pretend it’s cake? Everybody likes cake. Or soup, what about soup? Hot Guyana soup with eddo, plantain, cassava, pumpkin and thick-leaf poi on a cool, drizzly day. You may have chicken or fish in yours. Or we can cook crab soup by the sea on wood-fire, on a sunny day with warm briney breeze puffing around our ears.
All I ask is that you buy me a coffee. Or chai, that is, tea with spices. I like mine milky, with honey.
Your support is highly appreciated. I plan to use a percent of these earnings to help my friend Abigail who is on dialysis, and others in need, in my lovely native land, Guyana. (My email about the high cost of dialysis in GY was posted a while back here: Fay Abigail Yong.)
And what will you get in return for your support? Free cakes, free soup…ooops, I mean, free stories at https://neenamaiya.substack.com
Thank you, and safe travels as you wend your way through your days.