Friday, May 13, 2016

God Bless the Mango Tree

It's 8:30 am in Windsor, England, and I just had a Mango for breakfast for the first time since living in Asia. The nostalgia and memories associated with the scent, the taste, even the pulp between my teeth was enough to fill my eyes with surprising tears.

When I lived on Gili Meno, it was my routine to walk 2 minutes to the little makeshift shop of the village Nenek ( grandmother), and buy two fresh ginormous mangoes from her, for roughly the equivalent of 50 cents.  It was my routine so much that she often put aside 2 of her best mangoes waiting upon my early morning arrival, shooting me that sweet, puerile and toothless child-like grin.  Although we couldn't communicate via words, the mangoes became our language.

So every morning around 7 am, I'd carry my mangoes back to the jungle fortress of my front porch bungalow, strip down to my underwear and go to town . I never nailed the efficiency of the way the Asians have perfected the precise unity of knife and mango, but I suppose part of the fulfillment was eating it messily, slicing pieces of the fruit unskillfully from the pit and scraping every last bit of mango off the skin with my teeth, like a true Neanderthal:p   After my morning mango meditation, I'd rinse the orange evidence off in my salt water shower, and walk to the resort to teach my morning yoga classes.

This morning I stood in an oversized sweater, peering out the kitchen window with flooded eyes at a cascade of English cars in their morning commute as I leaned over the sink , once again scraping the remaining fruit off the skin with my teeth, juice splattering everywhere.

For a moment I was brought back to the songs my heart sang, and often cried in the little Indonesian village of Gili Meno. Every bite contained the vivid red of the hibiscus sea laden across the sandy village of Meno. It contained the laughter of my 3 year old neighbor, the fluidity of the sea turtles in their underwater dance, and the warmth and uncertainty that the yellow and purple skies after sunset beckoned every evening. 




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