PARADISE (Oranges)

 

Oranges

 Early March. Nice weather in Florida. My Valencia tree in front of the condo does not seem to know that it is dying of citrus greening. As it does every year at this time, it is blooming now, and filling the air with fragrance. I've thought of having the tree pulled out and replacing it, as it now produces nonedible, stunted oranges every year, but I hate to give up on it, since it refuses to be anything except an optimist. "My job is to bloom and produce Valencias; that's what I do."

 I grew up in paradise, with an orange grove behind every house we lived in. This was in Mt. Dora, Lake Co., big citrus country in those days, the 1940s and 1950s. During our time in Mt. Dora we lived in three different houses, all with oranges of every sort. In the pink cement block house—the last of the three—we had: a Navel tree, for earliest autumnal eating; lots of midseason juice orange varieties: Ruby Reds, Pineapples, Parson Browns; in March the lovely Temples; later in spring the Valencias; also two tangerine trees and two Duncan grapefruit. Every year in March the trees would all gird up their loins in unison and bloom; you could stand outside and savor the aroma of orange blossoms. Paradise.

 Bought some oranges at the farmers' market in Gainesville this past Saturday. The farmer, Mr. Wilkinson, insisted that they were "satsumas," but I knew he was wrong. When we moved from New Jersey to Mt. Dora in 1943, only eighty years ago, we had a satsuma grove behind our little stucco house. Maybe twenty-five small trees. The first citrus that I ever pulled and ate directly from the trees, peeling their supple skins off with my fingers. The house still stands, but, alas, the satsumas are long gone.

 Yesterday, I knew that I had only to cut into the oranges I had bought and sniff to confirm what I already suspected: that these were Temple oranges, which are God's best gift to humankind. I brought them home, cut into them, sniffed, then savored the taste: Temple oranges, succulent and semi-sweet, the best of all oranges yet invented. 

 In the grove behind the pink house we had some dead trees pulled out—this must have been about 1955—my father filled the empty space with five new little Temple trees. In no time, it seems, they were blooming and producing fruit. Delicious. Paradise.

 

                                                                        Temple Oranges

Scene From My Childhood

Orange grove behind our house, overgrown here and there with wild lantana bushes. An orange fallen from a Valencia tree, lying on the ground rotting, half of its surface covered with a bluish-white festering something. Now, recently, I have learned that what appears to be a layer of fuzz is actually a fungus, millions of minuscule hyphal tips, busily working to break down matter into nutrients.