A Mango a Day...

I never understood Eve or Snow White or Steve Jobs or the nicknamers of New York City. Why all the fuss over an apple? Apple schmapple. It is painfully obvious to me that these folks have never bitten into a tender, juicy, delicious mango.

Let’s just put it this way, if Snow White had ever tasted the sweet nectar of a mango from Mozambique, she would have taken that apple, regarded it, and disdainfully tossed it aside like a cheap imitation Kate Spade handbag. So while the miserable, sweltering heat has returned to Mozambique, it has also brought with it “mango season.” Ahhhhh…

I had never eaten a mango until arriving in Mozambique. In fact, my tropical fruit intake was more or less limited to Coconut Rum. Now, though, I can’t imagine my life without them. I firmly believe there are few things in this world more delicious than a mango. Even my Grandma’s famous homemade dollar pancakes taste like rotten coleslaw in comparison.

And because mangoes are as ubiquitous as Lady Gaga (there are mango trees everywhere and you can buy about 20 for under a dollar), for a little while at least, less people go hungry.

The only complaint I can file about mangoes is the messy eating process and the mango hairs that stick between your teeth in the aftermath of a mango binge.

If I were ever invited to tea with the Queen of England and that she-wolf Camilla Parker Bowles as a practical joke convinced Her Majesty to only serve barbeque ribs and mangoes, I could probably eat the ribs in a more graceful and ladylike way than I could the mangoes. There is just something so primitive and messy and wonderful about eating mangoes. I’m sure Emily Post would be disgusted with me.

I guess that after just recently returning from the States for Christmas and seeing my family, I have been feeling the sting of saying goodbye all over again, and well, my saudades are more acute than ever.

Saudade--golly, how to define “saudade”? It is just one of my favorite Portuguese words because while it is slightly ineffable, it also is the perfect manifestation of Mozambican hyper-drama into one even more perfectly hyper-dramatic word. All the aching and melancholy that could ever enter your sphere of emotions IS saudades. The best, most wam-bam-thank-you-ma’am way I heard it described was as “missing you sickness.” The point of this Portuguese vocabulary lesson, dear readers, is to say that my saudades are creeping up a bit and when that happens, I have to constantly remind myself of all the new and wonderful things I love here…like mangoes.

So while an apple a day may keep the doctor away,
A mango a day keeps my saudades at bay.

Yeppers, I am pretty sure the Bible and Disney and the Mac were a little premature with their silly apples. I’m especially disappointed with Eve. For me, if there was ever a fruit to shuck paradise for, it sure as hell would not be an apple. It’d be a mango.