Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Banana? (Yes.)

There’s an orange grove near my home in Florida.  Well, if I’m completely honest, there’s an orange grove near everywhere in Florida, and one of them is near me.  After all, the Florida’s Natural plant is only just up the road.  They even have a visitor center.  I assume they give you free orange juice when you go there, otherwise what’s the point?  I must assume this because every time I’ve wanted to stop and find out, a chain link fence on wheels has barred my entry and I’ve left with neither information nor juice, just bitterness in my soul.  I need hardly explain how disappointing to me this is, not because I love orange juice so much – it ties with pineapple as only my eighth favorite fruit juice, coming in just behind aloe, which counts as a fruit in Asia, or seventh behind pomegranate if you’re not in Asia – but really just because I love free things and visitor centers.  Which I think is valid.

In any case, there’s an orange grove near my home in Florida, and it’s orange picking time.  It’s been orange picking time for a while now and it’s not uncommon to see old school busses that have been poorly painted white or bluish waiting in the parking lot at the CVS for the day’s workers to show up and then get carted over to a grove that needs picked. 

And it’s easy to spot the route that trucks take once the workers have filled them up with oranges.  Locals have been known to stop by the side of the road and pick up the oranges that roll off the tops of the trucks at stoplights or coming around corners.  Granted, they have been sitting in the gutter for a little while, but that’s just one more good reason not to eat the peel.  Don’t eat the peel.

So, this grove near my home.  I confess I expected it to smell like oranges, evoke memories of lazy summer afternoons and picnics, and give me a general feeling of well-being as I sauntered contentedly in the dappled shade of leaves. 

In retrospect, I see that this was a misplaced hope.  If you pick up an orange in Wal-Mart, or whatever your grocery store of choice may be, seldom does it smell super-orangey.  Maybe if the skin is thin.  The skins of our oranges are not thin.  What it smells like in the grove is sand.  And rotting oranges.  Which is not the same as a picnic at all.  All around, under heavy-laden branches sit the sad fruits that just couldn’t hang on any longer.  The oranges that, despite their best efforts to cling to the branch the provided them with nutrients, protection, and companionship, have let go and fallen with a gentle thud into the sand below where a little time and a lot of ants begin the process that will return them back to the earth from whence they came.  Ashes to ashes and oranges to dust.  But in the meantime the grove smells like sand and rotting oranges.

And sometimes rotting carcasses.  Because aside from not smelling the way I think they should, orange groves are also more dangerous places than I expected.  It seems that around these parts at least, there are wild hogs that prowl the groves, looking for someone to devour.  Or oranges.  Possibly just oranges.  Either way, I’ve seen tracks, and driving past the grove on the way to church the other day, spotted the massive prone form of a hog that had eaten one orange too many and given up his porcine ghost.  On the way out of town he was just a lonely hillock of pork between two orange trees, but by the time I was on my way back home, he’d been joined by quite a few friends intent on helping him lighten his load as he passed from this world to the next.  

They were feathered friends. 

Vultures.  They were vultures.

So now when I take my constitutional through the grove it is with a wary step.  I already had to keep a weather eye open for the people working the grove who I’m guessing would not appreciate my presence.  Up to now I’ve chosen to misunderstand the No Trespassing sign.

Which hasn’t been difficult.  But I doubt the guy in charge of the orange trucks (or the local authorities) will be overly inclined to believe my innocent-face when I claim ignorance.

But now, on top of that, I have to be on the lookout for wild creatures that could (and most likely want to) gore me to death and leave me for the vultures.  Yesterday I saw the picked-over remains of a deer in the grove.  Naturally, I assume a hog got it.  I have no direct evidence for this, but I will defend this belief vociferously if pressed.  

You may well wonder why I don’t just turn left instead of right as I pass my mailbox.  The truth is grim.  The threat of prosecution at the hands of vindictive orange farmers and dismemberment upon the tusks of wild animals strike less fear in my heart than the hordes of old people who live all around me.  If I don’t turn left I’m in the wretched bowels of a retirement community where the antediluvian denizens look at me with suspicion in their eyes, resentment in their hearts, and naught but skin and liver spots between them and the clouds.  They all have golf carts and they’re not afraid to use them.

It’s like Cocoon around here.  There’s even a pool down the block and I constantly see them splashing around as if to give the impression of youth.  It bodes ill. 

Given the choice between the unconscionably old and the feral swine, I’ll take the feral swine.  And if I have to get arrested for it, so be it.