Money in the Ground

I walk through the grocery store every week.

I visit the produce department first because I have great ideas of loading my fridge up with fresh fruits and vegetables. I have the best intentions of doing so, yet my cart is still nearly empty when I leave that department. It is not the fruit the turns me away, it is the prices.

I cannot believe that mangos are more than a dollar. How could this be? They are one of my kid's favorite fruits, but they are a rare treat in my house because I just cannot bring myself to pay so much for them ... not when I used to get them for free.

While living in Africa, my family lived in several different houses and cities. One house that we lived in had a huge mango tree on the property. It was covered with the juicy, ripe fruit all season long. There were far too many mangos for any one family to eat, so there they would hang. They would turn from green to red and finally to yellow as they rotted waiting in the sun to be picked.

When my older sister was home from boarding school it was like my sisters and I were complete again. We were the Three Musketeers together again and we were always thinking up new and brilliant ways to get into trouble. There were so many mangos just sitting rotting on the ground, so we would run around collecting them. You had to be super careful and gentle with the delicate fruit or your fingers would push through the thin skin. The three of us would go around digging holes in the yard in order to throw a bunch of rotting mangos inside. Then we would take twigs and cover the hole, after that we would cover those up with leaves and dirt. After our traps were all set we would sit back and wait for our unsuspecting victims to come walking by and step into the gooey mess.

The only problem was that this particular house was pretty secluded from other people with a large, white cement wall encircling the entire thing, so no one ever came by.

After a while my sisters and I would get bored of sitting there and we would run off to play something else. More often than not we would forget all about the traps we had set ... that is until one of us stepped in one and got the mushy, rotten pulp of the mangos squished up between our own toes. Whoever was unlucky enough to step into the mess would hobble off to the house while the other two would sit and laugh about it.

Such a wonderful, fun memory that sits in my mind reminding me of all the fun I used to have overseas. We did not have gaming systems or even much TV, but we did have imaginations and whole lot of fun.

When I see all those mangos sitting in the bin at the grocery store I remember back to my childhood days and the games I used to play, but with mangos here at more than a dollar per fruit it is also a dreary reminder of all that money we were burying in the ground!