daily positive: fresh fruit, dirt cheap

I've been trying for the past few weeks to my energies on all things good. It's hard, especially since it's been a rough few weeks. My goal, every day, is to find one thing that makes living in the DR nice. Honestly? This winter, I would just turn on the news or open my Facebook feed to see how much snow was getting dumped on the Northeastern United States each day. Kind of mean to those who live there, but it definitely made island life desirable.

I do miss spring, though - the budding of the trees and flowers, cool weather. Mostly, I miss the gradual transition from cold to hot. Here we just have hot to hotter.

But! Spring in the DR brings fresh fruit in our backyard: guavas, cherries and (most importantly) a mango tree that has produced hundreds of mangoes this year --- and they're the good kind, not too stringy or worm infested.

Our backyard has cherries, limes, sour oranges, guava, canesten fruit, nisperos (loquat fruit), mangoes, avocadoes and coconuts. Amalio has tried to grow some papaya, and I'm happy to say that so far, that hasn't worked out (I hate papaya - especially the smell of the tree). He's also currently trying to grow granadillo - which is either a type of passion fruit (but I don't think so because we call that chinola here), or a kind of pomegranate.

Last week I needed to overload on some fruits due to a little bacterial infection - the doctor recommended the typical cranberries - which were nearly six dollars a pound in the super market since they're imported. He also recommended pineapple, coconut water and drinking baking soda (yuck!). I gave my brother-in-law one hundred pesos (about $2.50USD) - he came home with two 16-ounce bottles of fresh coco-water (because he was too lazy to get a coconut from the tree) and four nice sized pineapples.

Yum yum!