I Ate the Last Mango in Paris

By Deborah Sharp

Apologies to Jimmy Buffet for stealing his song title for my blog post. I've been humming that tune, though, since I powered through a marathon mango-massacre this afternoon. The kitchen counter looked like a tropical fruit crime scene, oozing with orangey golden juice and chunks of severed flesh.

Sorry, y'all. Nobody thought this was going to be a post about how to make a yummy mango smoothie, did they?

Anyhoo, we're at the very end of the mango growing season in south Florida. Past the end, in fact. These last half-dozen mangoes were over-ripe to the point of squishy; bruised and soft in places where they should be firm and blemish-free. Kind of like my 50-something-year-old thighs, but that's a topic for another day.

So, mangoes. As I stood there, up to my wrists in gunky mango goo, cutting, pulling at the fruit, trying to excavate the still-good morsels from the parts that were plainly bad, I realized the mangoes were a metaphor. Stay with me here, folks. I'm a writer. I do this stuff for a living.

A metaphor for what, you might ask? You might, if you've gotten this far anyway.

Those mangoes were like a manuscript. Okay, I know that's actually a simile, but metaphor sounds better with mango. If I'd been slicing up some sapodilla, I would have gone with simile. As I excised the spoiled fruit and collected a savory bowl of the good, I thought about how similar the process is to writing. You toss out lots of mushy, nasty goop to find the sweet parts, glistening like golden nuggets.

May your writing today be filled with nuggets as sweet as perfectly ripe -- but not too ripe -- mangoes. Even if it's soft and squishy, though, you can always put it in a blender and whip it into something delicious. The manuscript or the mango, either one.

How about you? Any scrumptious nuggets of writing you're savoring today? Your own or someone else's? I liked this line from Louis Lowy's debut, ''Die Laughing,'' describing a comedian who uses humor to deflect emotion: ''He settled for a brick barricade mortared with one-liners.''

Sweet!