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A while ago, Helen of Memo asked me if I’d like to join in a little fun zine of hers called the Ten Fingers Zine, and I happily obliged! The theme for the zine was Hometown, and boy I had lots of things to say about the topic.

I moved to my current town about 8 years ago, and it’s not that far from where I went to school as a young girl. Although my hometown is about a 15-minute drive away from where I now live, I love how small everything is; the houses, the fields, the quaint little chairs in my school, and the small little mural that my teacher commissioned me and another friend to draw when we were just 12 years old.

I think I miss my house the most – it’s a small, one-storey home that has lots of memories as I grew up. We took lots of pictures in that house, and one of the most memorable item that belonged there was a mango tree that my father planted just right outside on our little garden patch.

Throughout the years, it grew and bore us the sweetest mangoes we’ve ever tasted. Because we could only get mangoes a few times in a year, we found that standing by the tree and threatening to chop it down will usually yield a good harvest within a few months (my dad did this a lot!)

Sadly, a few months before we moved away, my dad got the help of neighbours to chop the tree down – he said that it was rotting from the inside and that it was inevitable that it should be cleared away. Imagine the sight of me waking up one morning to see the tree all on the ground! It was heartbreaking, and I remembered that I almost cried because I love it so much. I even thought to myself that we’re going to take the tree with us when we moved. How silly I was at that age — my dad knew that he had to do it when I wasn’t around, because there would be violent protests from my end! So my entry for Helen’s zine was about the mango tree that I still miss to this day. I felt like I let her down for leaving her behind.

All the illustrations in the zine can be torn away to become a postcard, which is fab! There’s lots of other ace illustrators in there too, like Jen Collins, Gemma Correll, Anthony Zinonos, Karoline Rerrie, Merlin Mason, Matt Saunders, and Helen Entwisle. You can purchase a copy of it in my Etsy shop, and if you made it this far, here’s a virtual hug for listening to my story!