Mango delight

Twenty years ago Rose planted mango seeds, from which three or four trees have been allowed to grow.

It's the mango season here now, and they are plentiful in the stores and on the streets.  Our trees have excelled themselves, and every flat surface in and around our house is covered in big, fat mangos.

Our mangos are the best.  No exaggeration.  I have eaten a great many over the last twenty-three years and no mangos commercially available are as good, flavourful and juicy as those from one of our trees. They have thinner seeds, too, which means more of the weight is edible flesh.  You will notice from the photos that our mangos do not necessarily have the clear  yellow colour the commercially grown product usually has.  I don't know how the growers get them that way, but our dull skins do not detract in any way from their eating qualities

They have to be harvested carefully as if they are allowed to fall they get damaged, and left on the trees the fruit bats enjoy them.  Fortunately Sonny Lopez, our part-time helper, is small, strong and agile and can go up the trees as necessary to bring the mangos down.  He can then take a big bag of them home for himself and his family, and Rose has to give away as many as possible as fast as possible.

Sonny:

We have known Sonny for almost twenty three years and he has has been a great help to us in many ways, building and maintaining much of our house and willing to do almost anything.  He has never learned to read paper plans, which has been a slight disadvantage but since I can read them easily it doesn't matter much.  During the  years I spent building and sailing boats here, he was a frequent companion in my trips to other islands, besides being a great help in the boat-building process.  For a number of years we employed Sonny full time, but he began to develop other interests and take on social and community duties - elder in his church and president of a local association, plus a small business of his own - so the arrangement morphed into part time.  It's enough, as it happens, as we have no big projects in hand now.