Of Candles and Determination

Below is something I wrote down last week Tuesday...

Yesterday I came home from work to a blackout on my street. This was at around 7pm. For lack of anything better to do in the dark, my sisters and I passed the time by singing for our supper – literally – and chatting until around 10pm when we went to bed with the blackout still in effect. I’d like to think that baby Shanae enjoyed our singing as she was wide awake during our singing session and seemed to be listening to everything. However, this is not the point of my story. The main thing I’d like to share is that…my father had cooked the meat portion of our dinner, chicken with cauliflower, before the lights went out but he didn’t get a chance to reheat the rice & peas that we had in the fridge. Rice and peas taste great with the chicken that my father makes but there was no light so we knew that we would probably have to eat dry food, such as sandwiches, for dinner. My mother, on the other hand, was determined to have us eat rice and peas. She decided to heat the rice using candles and set about doing so. Yes I wrote CANDLES. My mother was reheating the rice using the flames from 7 tealight candles.

So if anyone had come by our house last night at around 7:30pm they would have heard 3 horribly out of tune voices singing and seen my mother stirring with all her might the contents of a pot which she held hovered over 7 candles that she had put in a baking pan to rest on the dining table. Later on that night, had anyone passed by the back of my house at around 8:30pm they would have seen another funny sight if they looked through our open screen door. After my mother finished reheating the rice - yes she was successful and it tasted great – she threw water on the candles to put out the flames. This had the adverse effect of making a HUGE flame of fire which got worse when she threw a wet cloth on it. The smoke alarms were going mad and there was a frantic rush to get the baby out of the house and to try to put out the fire. The fire only subsided after my sisters found a can of baking powder and threw it all on the blaze of burning candles.

Oh what a night!