the seasons

From top to bottom, you have a moth the size of a tube of toothpaste (!), pomegranates, bananas, limes and mangoes - all located in my yard!!

It’s mango season here in Paraguay, which means every where you look trees and trees full of yellow mangoes are filled with little kids trying to knock ‘em down. These particular kind of mangoes aren’t my favorite – they’re too stringy – but they have the advantage of being free, since I have a huge gorgeous mango tree in my yard. For the past few months I’ve been staring at the tree, willing the fruits to ripen, and checking out the neighbor’s trees for signs that their mangoes are beating mine. Tomorrow I plan to put the mangoes in the blender and freeze the juice in little plastic bags to make popsicles!

I never paid much attention to fruit seasons in the US – with the exception of going apple picking in the fall, and I suppose knowing that watermelon was a summer fruit. Oh, and pumpkins must be an October thing. Really, though, it doesn’t much matter there, you can get apples at any time of year at the store. But here, when the mangoes are gone, they’re gone. It’s also getting to be pomegranate season, I found out, because the flowers on another tree in my yard are inflating into big pomegranates. And apparently it was lime season when I moved in back in July, because now my lime tree is out of limes (how I took them for granted!). Papayas, in case you didn’t know, can grow all the time, so those trees are always exciting to watch (though hard to get because the trees are so tall). And bananas too can grow at any time, though each tree will only give fruit once, so apparently you have to chop down the tree part and let it grow again from the trunk, and then you can keep getting bananas. The things I’m learning!

In case you’re keeping track, my yard has trees of bananas, papayas, mangoes, limes, pomegranates and also sour oranges (they taste like limes). AND a beautiful tree that I thought was dead has blossomed in the rainy season to sprout pretty red flowers and tons of welcome shade. Sure beats my asphalt back yard in Brooklyn! Many trees grow in Tacuati....