The Weight of Mangoes

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Marisa brought mangoes home with her from their trip over the weekend.  I hadn't had one in 10 years or more.  So I peeled one to eat and all the images of Rosemary Drive  came back in a mixture of heavily scented mango trees (there were 5 huge ones that shaded two sides of our home) which turned into heavily fruit-laden mangoes.  We ate nothing else for weeks when they first starting ripening, then we would throw them at each other, and by the end we would have nothing to do with the miserable lumps of fruit (and hundreds of fruit flies).  By the time little Miss Margaret came into our family I would carry her around the fruit so she wouldn't get her pretty little shoes messy.  (Mark didn't need carrying....he happily tromped through the goo with loud delight! 

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There were two more trees in the back right behind our clothesline and those trees dropped plenty of gooey sap onto our Mom's clean laundry.....I believe Dad rejiggered the posts that held the laundry to solve that problem.  I recall helping mom with clothes in so far as I could hand them to her out of the basket, but I was not yet tall enough to reach the line.  One day my father, on a Saturday, had gone back into the downtown area of West Palm Beach to search for a $50 dollar bill that he thought he must have lost out of his pocket the day before.  My mother was quite worried about it and spoke kindly about him in his distress. That rare compassion for our Dad, from our Mom, is still lodged in my memory as an distinct anomaly.
 

Later in the day, I was out back again on my way to my friend Rosemary's house, on a tidy little path connecting them.  I spotted a dollar bill (what did I know what a $50 bill looked like!) right out in plain sight near the pathway and picked it up and ran back to the house to show mom.  She was surprised and relieved and couldn't wait til Dad came back to show him.  When he did arrive I was credited with finding it and felt quite the 'somebody' for once.  It is the one incident I can recall that I was not dismissed or ridiculed by her and therefore I recall it with some detail. I think Mom secretly liked our home there and was greatly relieved to be out of the tiny apartment we lived in while Dad was working in Miami.

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Mangoes!  Who knew they carried such weight!

Mary

- Born February 11, 1954

- Wife, mother, grandmother, Maui.

- Sadly left us on February 02, 2018.

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