Mango rain

Our yard in Africa was covered in sand, and in the center of all the sand there was a water pump that dripped when my brothers and I didn’t close the spigot tightly. My father planted a flamboyant tree beside the pump and said, “At least now that dripping water won’t be wasted.” And he was right. The flamboyant tree grew tall and strong beside the faucet even when the other trees died, even when the droughts and dust storms came, even when a rogue camel ate most of its branches, even when the well-meaning laundry man dumped gallons of detergent-ripe water among its roots. It grew tall and strong enough to flower – a couple sparse buds, but good for a first try – the year I was seventeen.

Flamboyant is a French word that means “fiery.” Every May the flamboyant tree senses the coming rain and catches fire in anticipation. Like a bride who dyes her hands with henna, the reaching branches burst out flaming red buds that open just in time to catch the mango rains. The mango rains are scarcely rain at all, just a taste of hope on the starving ground and the wide-spread flamboyant petals. The flowers open in time for the mango rains. But they are also in time for the dust storms that signal the changing weather and later vanguard the real rains, the downpours so insistently torrential that they almost seem an adequate answer for the ground that has cracked and cried for months.

              The Sahara is a harsh mother. She scalds and sandpapers her offspring before she feeds them. In May the days are so hot that the ground shimmers. And in that shimmering incubator the dust storms hatch. All my childhood I watched them churn into fury as they approached our town. They whipped the houses and lashed the trees and when I was seventeen they ripped the first flowers off the young flamboyant tree and sent them whirling away into infinity. The tree produced a few hopeful buds, again and again, in time for every storm that May. And finally, in time for rain. 

I remember you the way I saw you that first year of the flamboyant. I didn’t know I could be so vividly alive or so piercingly confused. I only knew that I – the veteran of goodbyes – had never feared goodbye the way I came to fear it that summer. One night we watched the distant purple lightning and we hoped together that the rain was coming. When the wind picked up you went home. Even in the electricity-less African night I feared cobras and scorpions and curfews less than the fact that you’d bought your ticket away from here. That night I lay on the hard ground, feeling the gravel pinch my bare neck and arms, watching the dust storm swallow the stars. When the rain came it found my dusty face already muddy.  

It’s ten years since the flamboyant tree first budded and ten years since I turned away so I wouldn’t see you wave goodbye. I’ve learned how to reach my branches out and bud again… again…. Again. I wrote and I sang about the other boys. But I still haven’t got words for the goodbye I never said to you. When the downpour comes, does the flamboyant still miss its flowers? Because I miss the way I could come alive before I knew that you were mango rain.