I don’t remember when my mango obsession begun. Most of the wild mango in Ghana are the small yellow-skinned, “hairy” kind that are best enjoyed as so: roll mango on hard surface or in palms to soften, bite off the skin at the tip,suck the living daylights out of the mango – I mean suck it! Then pull out the seed and scrape it clean with teeth, also attack the inside of the skin to make sure you get all the pulp possible.
I don’t remember when my mango obsession begun. When we moved to Ghana from Germany, I became fascinated with the beauty of the plants around me and the soil in which they grew (hey, I ended up a Biology major). I would eat an orange, and plant the seeds in the backyard. I would steal beans from the kitchen and put them in small bowls with moistened cotton wool balls to start them sprouting. I did the same with groundnuts and actually transferred these from my cotton-wool nursery to my little garden. Then one day while I was doing serious damage to a mango seed, I decided to go ahead and try my moist cotton-wool trick with it (yeah, there was a lot of cotton-wool missing from my mom’s stash, but it was all for an educational purpose, OK?!) It took several weeks, but the mango seed started to sprout and I transferred it to the backyard also. Everyday I would watch my garden grow. The groundnuts matured the earliest, and yes they were magnificent to eat.
We moved homes, and I made sure to transfer both my orange and mango seedlings to the new house. They were joined by banana trees, plantain trees, an indian almond tree, a pawpaw tree, a couple of coconut palms, a “real mango” tree – the Ivorian kind, a sour-sop tree (which my dad called apple – do you know how many pages of Brittanica Encyclopedia I had to flip to find out exactly what that tree was only to find out it belongs to the custard apple family so my dad wasn’t totally wrong) – lots of flowers, and when the season was right corn planted by my parents. Can I tell you how those bananas and corn were the best in the world….even though the soil at the new house was clay beneath the first 30 cm (yes I dug deep to see the change in soil layers – I think we’ve established I did things that normal 11-12 year old girls didn’t do so moving on…). I didn’t care much for pawpaw, but looking at how everyone else was eating it, it must have been heaven too. Alas, I had to say goodbye to my little babies when we left for the US but I returned six years later to enjoy the fruit of my labour. Umm, OK, at least I enjoyed the mango. In regards to the orange tree, I must have been too focused on my experimentation and not on “growing oranges” because those oranges were so bitter! *shudder*
A lover of mangoes. A woman - smart, without pretense, lefthanded, Afropolitan - navigating this thing called life. An unapologetic believer in social justice and karma. Choosing to radiate positive energy and be true to myself. Here, my musings.
mmmmm,mango…when mama left and asked us what we wanted back i said i wanted mangoes, lots and lots of mangoes (and the indian almonds or whatever they were also). i miss them so.
Lawdie chile!! All that…wow..what am I gonna learn about you through this blog.
daddy cut down the indian almond tree at the old house (you knew that already right) because his mom came and said it’s the meeting place for witches so we shouldn’t have it our backyard. So no indian almond for me either!