I stand over the kitchen sink, sucking the last bits of meat off of the mango pit. We're making daiquiris tonight. I think of Mali - mangoes always remind me - and suddenly I'm there, sitting in the string plastic chair under my family's gwa, enjoying the slight respite of the sun setting in hot season. I can feel my skirt and tank top sticking to my skin, run my hands across a forehead spitting sweat. It smells like earth in a dusty way, and the air is hazy and desperate from water deprivation. It sounds like kids running and yelling, the same sound everywhere, and like animals - guinea hens honking, chickens clucking. A donkey's bray is carried over by the wind. I stare at a lizard zig-zagging along the corn stalk roof of the gwa, having given up on paying any attention to my book. Someone Russian - Dostoevsky or Nabokov - that requires more energy than I can expend in this heat.
Djelikat shuffles toward me, holding a small bucking in one had and her pagne in the other. She drops the bucket in front of me and clears her throat as she straightens, eyeing my reaction. The 3 mangoes bob in water in the bucket, calling to me. I break first, grinning at Djelikat. I ni ce!, "Thanks!" I say, diving into my pre-dinner snack. She must have put the laundry-basket size bucket of mangoes inside to keep the chickens and goats away, or else I would have grabbed them myself. Djelikat shakes her head, chuckling, as she moves back to making dinner.
As fast as I was there, as I could feel the dirt & the sweat & the love, I'm back in Iowa, staring at a counter full of freshly bought groceries. As I often felt in Mali, the reality of here and the reality of there don't seem like they can exist at the same time. One of them must be a dream.
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