Sofa Illuminations

A perplexing revelation came to me as I was sitting here just now, talking to a friend of mine in The Netherlands about Australia's amazing mangoes...

Christmas time is always interesting for me. Instead of it warming up (as I'm used to) it cools down... Instead of the smell of ripe tropical fruit, the smell of scented pinecones greets you when you walk into the grocery store. People are pulling out scarves and woolens, instead of tank tops and flip flops.
Before Christmas, on a cold wintery day, a friend sipped hot chocolate with me as we watched snow laden clouds drift gloomily across the sky, and asked "What do you miss most about Christmas in Australia?"
Without hesitation I said, "Mangoes."

The smell, the sickly sweet bins of them that you drift past at the local corner shop... the way they spice up the air when you cut into them... the slippery seed at the center that holds so much goodness and requires so much flossing afterwards...

But they're not the same here, they're more bitter, and less intoxicating.

Then a dear friend of ours married a man from Uganda, right before Christmas. R and I sang at their wedding. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the reception area to see that the place cards on the table were mangoes! Not ordinary store bought mangoes, but large, fat, red-ripening mangoes that made my heart pound. The kind where, when you sniff the stem, all you can think about is summer as a child and your face sticky with mango juice.

It was like a gift from heaven for me. In the middle of a cold winter, a home country touch of Christmas.

I treasured those mangoes. I took them home, and for fear they would go bad in my refrigerator while I was gone, I wrapped them carefully in a sweater and put them in my hand luggage for the plane ride to Denver the next day. They arrived safe and sound, and into the refrigerator they went.

Periodically, I would pull them out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter, thinking that today would be the day I'd cut into them and share them with the family, but somehow they would sit there just long enough to be overlooked, and then returned to the refrigerator by someone kind enough to try and preserve them for me... And then later I would pull them out again, to get them to room temperature, and smell them for a while, and thing about how wonderful a surprise they were... and then they'd disappear into the refrigerator again.

They were left in Denver, uneaten.

And as I sat here, talking to my friend about mangoes, I remembered them. Those two luscious, ruby coloured mangoes that smelled so sweet, and were such a gift... and a small question dropped into my mind...

"How often do you do that?"

It was a painful question for me.

How often are we blessed... do we receive a beautiful gift, and then never truly enjoy it? How often do we look at it, admire it, caress it... and never partake of it?

Food for thought.