My Grandmother’s Village

A special place to me from my childhood is my grandmother’s village; almost every summer vacation was spent with my grandmother in a village called Kookosua #2. This village had about 600 inhabitants and almost all the inhabitants were farmers. This village had no electricity at the time and a full moon night was a party and hang out night for all the youth in the village. My grandmother’s house was inhabited with about five of my aunts and uncles, their spouses and their children so every summer vacation was the noisiest and chattiest because this when all the students had come on vacation.
Some of the things I enjoyed most was picking cashew with my grandmother on her cashew farm. I and my cousins were to pick the cashew head from the fruit and we could eat or throw the fruit away. The cashew fruit left a strange taste in your mouth like the taste a banana leaves in your mouth or the taste of orange juice of kind of acidic roughness. The rotten fruits smelt like stale milk and apple. We also went mango fruit picking with catapults and we will do challenges of who can get the most mangos. A real mango fruit tastes totally different from mango juice. The real mango fruit is not really sugary depending on how ripen the fruit is.
One thing I also liked was the moonlit nights I mentioned in the beginning. There was no electricity to disturb the grayish light that illuminated the whole village. The stars could be seen shining from the sky like a romantic candlelit night in a distance. The air smelt of dust and rain at the same time and just the smell of the trees and the mud was refreshing and relaxing. And you could always here the crickets chirping and the dogs howling. You would think living without electricity would “suck” but to me these were the best summers of my life and that small village is still a fond memory for me.