Footprints in the Snow

Excerpts ...

Perhaps it was fate, maybe it was just the stars aligned in my favor. Less than a week after I had received my letter of acceptance, I was summoned to my parents’ house in Croydon where my concerned parents informed me that my younger sister had decided to take a year off to find herself. My father explained this to me with steady streams of interjection from my mother whose constant refrain was ‘I don’t know when she got missing that she thinks she needs to find herself, where will she start looking for herself now’

Bolanle had finished her A’levels earlier in the year and the plan was for her to go to the university until this latest developement which was based on her argument that she needed a year off to cool off after spending all of her life (as she put it) studying. I told my parents that it was possibly a good idea that she announced it now, rather than begin university and then decide to drop out, they should look at this year off for finding herself as a period when she would mature and besides her counterparts back home in Nigeria were spending more than a year or more waiting for some elusive university entrance result which would not be forthcoming since most results were canceled because of allegations of exam malpractice. Although I was making it up as I went along, my parents listened intently. They found some form of reassurance in my words of wisdom and it was interesting to see that I still held some minor clout with them. I thought it would be a good time to break the news to them and present them with my proposal which had occurred to me once I heard the news of Bolanle. My father’s face was blank as I explained my job offer to them and from his questions I knew he was juxtaposing my qualifications with the tasks that I told them I would be taking on. When I proposed that following discussions with Kole, I would like Bolanle to accompany me, my mother had a distant look in her eyes and mumbled something that sounded that I should not take my eyes off her for a moment- I made a mental note to cut out my eyes from a photo of myself and glue them to my younger sister’s chest. They were both in agreement that perhaps it was a good idea since under my watchful eye was likely to get into less trouble.