Sudden inspirations or cravings:
Deep fried or spicy food.

In front of the house was this little garden. Actually it wasn't much of a garden cos it had more weeds than flowers and the ground was quite bare...not much grass. The biggest reason for this was the mango tree. It was so huge it practically covered half of the whole garden.

I do not remember actually eating a single mango from that tree. Maybe because my family members are generally very lazy and none of us actually bothered to go check on the fruits to see if they were ripe till it was too late and they start to rot. Otherwise, when my mother is in a good mood, she might pick one or two unripe ones and make sweet-sour titbits with them. Yummy...

During hot days, I used to climb that tree just to see how high I can go. For people who have not seen mango trees before, generally they don't grow very tall, but they have a lot of branches. So actually the climb was quite easy, but I felt very accomplished most of the time anyway. I remember one of the evenings, I climbed so high I could look over our roof and see the whole neighbourhood. It was beautiful, with the evening sun rays shining and bouncing off the roofs of all the houses. I was so proud of myself. Hehe.

I used to have this romantic image of me sitting in the shade of the tree, sitting between two branches, reading my Enid Blyton story books. Alas I never managed to fulfill my romantic wish. Somehow the red ants on the tree were easily fascinated with the books too and tend to invade too much of my privacy. But anyway assuming I do not spend most of the time defending myself against red ants, I still think sitting under the mango tree would have been great.

But later, when we moved to Singapore and the house was lent to my grandmother, the tree had already become very old and big. The adults decided to cut the tree down. They cut down the branches one by one and finally, a tree stump was left - as ugly and cruel as an open wound. I felt like I was being cut. It was horrible. For the next few years, I have always felt that I have lost my childhood.

But of course, I was only the very young and self-proclaimed romantic poet, you know, during the growing up days. Now, I finally realise that the tree has never been gone. It's always been there, just the way I like it.