My mother had three sisters and they raised me in rotation, the way you would turn a book over to keep its spine from breaking. Auntie B's kitchen smelled of groundnut oil and the particular sweetness of plantain that has just hit the pan. Auntie I's kitchen smelled of Maggi and the steam from a pot that had been cooking long enough that nobody remembered starting it. Auntie C's kitchen did not smell of cooking at all. It smelled of her, which is a thing I cannot describe except to say that when I closed my eyes in her house I could tell I was there.
They fed me the way a river feeds a field, with the steady carelessness of something that does not keep accounts. I did not say thank you properly until I was twenty-three, and by then two of them were dead, and the third had moved to London and would not eat my cooking when I made her the soup I had watched her make a thousand times.
There is no moral here. Only the smells, and the pots, and the fact that when I close my eyes I still know which house I am in.
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