The Tortoise Story My Grandma Told Me That I Trusted More Than Cinderella #300

This topic brought a smile to my face and nostalgia because while growing up, we were told, and I also heard, a lot of different fairy tale stories of different dimensions. Some were cultural, some were related to religion, just all sorts of things. And I remember a few times when we were eating and something, a piece of food, fell on the floor; there was always this story that we shouldn't pick it up again because doing so means the devil has eaten it and we shouldn't put it back. Now that I'm grown, that sounds so funny and ridiculous at the same time.

However, out of many, my favorite was not actually a fair take on the glass slipper sense. But it was one of the stories my grandmother used to tell us before she passed away, most especially when NEPA took off the light and she gathered us outside her compound during holidays or when she came visiting. But it was the series of stories built around a tortoise who talked his way into a big problem at all the gatherings of animals, clever, greedy, and always in a way too confident; overdoing; pleased; and wise with himself.

And one of her stories that I seem not to forget was one of her stories about this particular tortoise and other animals who were competing to marry the daughter of another animal. But before they could be allowed, they would all have to drink a bowl of very hot water. Other animals drank it immediately, and it burnt their mouths, so they were cancelled. But the tortoise was too clever; he carried the water and was going around showing all the people around who came to watch them and telling them, "This is the hot water I want to drink," and by the time he got to the last person, the water had already turned cold, which gave him an upper hand to marry the daughter they were competing for.

I actually used to believe this story, especially more than I believed that a pumpkin could become a carriage. And the storyline about Cinderella magic was not something I could easily relate to because it felt distant and something only happening in movies or a foreign land to a girl I couldn't picture clearly. But the storyline about the tortoise was still something thinkable and rational, though a little bit exaggerated, and relatable, the type of storyline whose doings and foolishness I've probably seen around.

Now that I am mature and looking back, what I have gotten to realize was not even about the animals talking. I, for one, never questioned if a tortoise could talk or regarded it as the wisest animal with a cunning mentality, as my grandmother does say. But I believed the story or fairytale was duly about passing a message across to us, but if someone is so clever, like a tortoise without having a bit of humanity in them, there is always a punishment at the end. And also that greed always finds a way back to hunt and bite the greedy person.

I believe in this story to the extent that I always imagined that a tortoise was a fast animal with the way my grandmother usually put it in stories; I guess it was my wild imagination. And now, I have, in a way, seen how that similar pattern has played out with real adults, looking at what a talking tortoise clearly has taught me first. Though it was a story by my grandmother, now I believed that the animals were not the point; they were just subjects in trying to tell me how to figure out people, reading them long before I got to know that was what was happening.

Thank you for reading.

_{Images created by Gemini AI}