People think I’m eventually going to run out of quirky things to write about life in Florida. I’m not even close. Not while I can think of things like oranges.
Oh, the humanity! The maledictions oranges secret behind their smug, face-puckering peels sends shudders down my rind.
As kids, how many times did our mothers tell us to quit whining and just eat our orange slices?
“But Mommy, there’s too much of this white stuff all over it!”
“Just eat it, it’s good for you.”
Dad pops head from behind newspaper, “Yeah, and the white stuff is a great source of fiber. Try eating the peel as well.”
How many times do we get a peek of orange’s pulpy promise of goodness, only to receive a jet of juice directly to the eyeball? Statistics show that oranges are sentient and evil. Tell me oranges are good, and I’ll ask you to peel one.
Even in the form of orange juice, oranges are still a threat. When I was a kid in the ’90s, Mom would take me to Aldi. I went to beg for knock-off Fruit Roll-Ups, get denied, crawl into a box, and hope I could die in this grocery store of gloom. Today, I don’t recognize Aldi at all. But I digress from orange juice – I see what you’re doing, you wicked oranges, you’re trying to trick me into writing about something else.
At Aldi, Mom would buy the concentrated orange juice. The stuff would be in these cardboard-ish, can things (I’m sorry, I’m not a very good writer). When we’d get home, Mom, probably still seething from trying to parent me through a trip to Aldi, would punish me by making me stir up the juice. Yeah, right. The juice had concentrated itself into a flint rock. I’d attempt to soften it by pouring hot water over it, hitting it with my Louisville Slugger, and boiling it over Mom’s cauldron. By the time I got the stuff stirred, my voice had changed, and I was beginning to grow hair on my upper lip.
… which takes me to high school. My parents, who were educators (thus our state of destitution/trips-to-Aldi), finally scraped up enough dough for real orange juice. Before school every day, I drank orange juice alongside my favorite breakfast cereal, plain rolled oats drenched in milk. My stomach curdled for four years. I wasn’t a good chemistry student.
So maybe your experience with oranges is not as painful as mine. Perhaps you’ve only bitten into the occasional seed and had to call poison control a few times. Or you don’t mind getting your eyeballs drenched in citric acid. Mayhap you love how the rind creeps up under your fingernails, hiding there, waiting for the next time you lick your finger. Burlap sacks, you’re past all this, and you’re thinking I’m making a big deal of nothing. Oranges are great. We’re in Florida, and our oranges are delicious.
Nope. Not long after arriving in Florida, I actually found an orange tree in a vacant lot that looked innocent enough. On it hung a huge, ripe orange, looking ready to be eaten. I grasped it, peeled it back, thinking to myself, This is going to be amazing. An orange grown right here in Florida, plucked right from the tree.
In an alternate universe, I may have been right. But in the universe my poor body is subjected to, I was dead wrong. Have you ever eaten an unripe as well as over-ripe lemon? That’s what this orange tasted like. And while my tongue survived with only minor burns, I could feel the juice doing things in my stomach that should not be written about.
What I should write about, since we’re nearing Christmas, or New Year’s, or Easter (I’m not much good with publishing calendars), is the tradition of giving good little girls and boys oranges in their stockings. In my opinion, good kids act more annoying than the kids who receive coal, so oranges serve them right. Oh, and don’t forget to give the good child a peppermint straw with their orange. That should do it.
