Ruth’s Big Ugali That Will Never End

It’s quite counterintuitive how my best memories of Ruth happened when we weren’t together. I lived and worked in Thika when Ruth was completing her studies at KU. My weekdays schedule required me to be at work from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and since I was working out at a gym to manage my weight, the earliest I would get in the house was 9 p.m. 

Ruth’s schedule was the complete opposite. She would complete her classes at lunch time and had the whole afternoon to go swimming at Kasarani or raid Ruiru’s nyama choma dens with her classmates. I saved her from such debauchery when I issued her with my spare keys. Up until then she was the typical campus chick with time to spare and energy to burn. 

Every girl is a girlfriend material until you give her an opportunity to showcase her wife “materialness” if so to speak. When I gave Ruth my spare keys, she hit the road running as wife material 001 and has never looked back. One Friday shortly after she gained the keys to my kingdom – never mind she said my house was smaller than her bedroom – I got back home to find the biggest ugali I had ever seen since I started living alone.

You know the ugali is big when it wears the sufuria covering it like a hat. It’s so big the sufuria doesn’t so much cover it as sit on top of it. If you thought I was jumping up and down like a kid who’s seen cake, you’re wrong. Quite to the contrary, the spirit of Judas Iscariot lamenting Mary Magdalene’s waste of resources in anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive oil came upon me like a rash. I called Ruth immediately and reprimanded her for the wanton waste of cooking ugali I couldn’t finish in one sitting.

All my meal planning before I met Ruth was based on food I could clear in one sitting. My three sufurias were either on the cooker or waiting in the sink to be cleaned. Holding food for the next meal was never in their job description. When the dust settled, Ruth explained that she’s used to cooking for a family of seven and in her father’s house, the only limiting factor was the size of the sufuria!

I didn’t tell Ms Right this but I enjoyed that ugali for the next week! Then it hit me that it wasn’t such a bad idea to cook in wholesale fashion. From that time on, I would know Ruth passed by my house in the evening when I was ambushed by large servings of meat and ugali as soon as I went into the kitchen. It wasn’t long before my seven-day free subscription ran out. When Ms Right joined the dots and realized I was hooked, she asked me to buy a fridge to continue enjoying the service. That’s a story for another day but I will always remember that big ugali as the day Ruth transformed from a girlfriend material to a wife material. If they say the way to a man’s heart is his belly, Ruth built an expressway!

Ruth may be one of the smallest girls yet her gargantuan ugali betrays her big heart. It took me a whole week to eat her first large serving. Suffice it to say that like the proverbial gift that keeps on giving and like the widow of Zarephath’s never ending jar of flour and never emptying jug of oil, I’ll eat this woman till kingdom come!