6 foot tall and Bulletproof - Eating Mangoes
After a somewhat glum day yesterday, I'm completely on top of things today - Look out world! (or I could say Hello World! like John Laws but one twit saying that is enough).
I still feel blue about Paul Hester. Depression is a dreadful thing. The news indicates that there is more to his suicide than originally thought, broken relationships etc etc. Terribly terribly sad. I loved Split Enz and I loved Crowded House. I ache for his loved ones.
I just read a blog post about pineapple that has me drooling. http://melllyfeline.blogspot.com/
So I'm sitting here guzzling down green grapes as a substitute. I have a similar emotive story about fruit - but the culprit is mangoes - the sweet lush flesh of Bowen mangoes grown in our backyard before the cyclone in Darwin. Having so many beautiful rose coloured mangoes that we didn't know what to do with them. Mango chutney bottling sessions on the weekends. Sitting on the back steps with the mango side cut into squares and turned inside out. Sticky juice running everywhere, staining clothes. Slurping and biting, never quick enough to contain all the juice. Neighbourhood kids stealing them off the trees by the bucketload. Dodging green ants as you picked them off the tree or the ground. The odd smell of the rotten and squashed ones.
Those trees were completely flattened during the cyclone. We were re-assigned a different house in a different suburb once the rebuilding began. Dad didn't really have the heart for gardening anymore, he had put so much effort into the other house. He eventually planted two mango trees in our new backyard, but they were just not nice. He chopped them down many years later. The green ants were just so annoying when you had to mow around the trees.
I rode past our old house block years after the cyclone on my bike one day. There had been a big ugly brick house built there - no cyclone was going to move that sucker. And sure as anything those big old mango trees were back to their full glory. As I rode past, I noticed some little kids high up in the branches.....
On a side note, apparently the green ants disappeared from Darwin for a few years after the cyclone. They eventually regathered and marched their way up from Katherine, just like the cane toads are doing as we speak. There was a teacher from New Zealand (her name was Miss Kidd from memory) at my school in 1975. Just why she was teaching in a totally demolished city will remain a mystery. But she didn't believe that there were green ants - she wanted proof. Hopefully she stayed in Darwin just long enough to have one bite her on the bum.
Now I live in Southern climes and pay $4 each for extremely average mangoes. I still have to have a couple a year, even at that exorbitant price. Weiss Mango Bars are pretty yum also.
Yep, there are still some things that I miss about Darwin...sigh....
I still feel blue about Paul Hester. Depression is a dreadful thing. The news indicates that there is more to his suicide than originally thought, broken relationships etc etc. Terribly terribly sad. I loved Split Enz and I loved Crowded House. I ache for his loved ones.
I just read a blog post about pineapple that has me drooling. http://melllyfeline.blogspot.com/
So I'm sitting here guzzling down green grapes as a substitute. I have a similar emotive story about fruit - but the culprit is mangoes - the sweet lush flesh of Bowen mangoes grown in our backyard before the cyclone in Darwin. Having so many beautiful rose coloured mangoes that we didn't know what to do with them. Mango chutney bottling sessions on the weekends. Sitting on the back steps with the mango side cut into squares and turned inside out. Sticky juice running everywhere, staining clothes. Slurping and biting, never quick enough to contain all the juice. Neighbourhood kids stealing them off the trees by the bucketload. Dodging green ants as you picked them off the tree or the ground. The odd smell of the rotten and squashed ones.
Those trees were completely flattened during the cyclone. We were re-assigned a different house in a different suburb once the rebuilding began. Dad didn't really have the heart for gardening anymore, he had put so much effort into the other house. He eventually planted two mango trees in our new backyard, but they were just not nice. He chopped them down many years later. The green ants were just so annoying when you had to mow around the trees.
I rode past our old house block years after the cyclone on my bike one day. There had been a big ugly brick house built there - no cyclone was going to move that sucker. And sure as anything those big old mango trees were back to their full glory. As I rode past, I noticed some little kids high up in the branches.....
On a side note, apparently the green ants disappeared from Darwin for a few years after the cyclone. They eventually regathered and marched their way up from Katherine, just like the cane toads are doing as we speak. There was a teacher from New Zealand (her name was Miss Kidd from memory) at my school in 1975. Just why she was teaching in a totally demolished city will remain a mystery. But she didn't believe that there were green ants - she wanted proof. Hopefully she stayed in Darwin just long enough to have one bite her on the bum.
Now I live in Southern climes and pay $4 each for extremely average mangoes. I still have to have a couple a year, even at that exorbitant price. Weiss Mango Bars are pretty yum also.
Yep, there are still some things that I miss about Darwin...sigh....
posted by Cathy at 3:10 pm
1 Comments:
Hey there - thanks for stopping by and for the lovely words - :)
Mangoes are wonderful - love mangoes - I'll do a post on that next. Sigh. Wishing I had one now. I adore Weiss Mango Bars - not a fan of the tropical one tho - have you tried Heaven's Wildberry Gelato? RUN NOW and get them - so so good!
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