About ten years ago, I came home with a little orange tree in the back seat of the car. The way pomegranates remind me of my grandma, oranges remind Nancy of hers. When Nancy was a girl, her grandma spent her winters out of the deep snow of Southern Idaho and in the seemingly endless orange groves of central Arizona.
It's a fairly well known fact that spring comes in Arizona much sooner than it does in other parts of the country. Taking advantage of this fact, when Nancy's family grew tired of the long winters up north, they would go visit Grandma and her warm weather.
The orange trees would be in full spring splendor, some with large, ripe oranges and fragile, fragrant blossoms growing side by side on the same tree. Over time, orange blossoms, reminded Nancy more and more of her grandmother.
It was a spring day years later, and I was in the doghouse. So I bought an orange tree. It was just 3 feet tall and about the diameter of a quarter at the base of the trunk. And it had three or four, tiny oranges growing on it.
In our small, light deprived house, we found a spot for our little orange tree, by the window in our bedroom. Though we lost most of those first little oranges, the tree liked the spot and, by the next spring was completely covered in little, white, sweet-smelling blossoms.
Over the years we've eaten just eight or ten oranges from that tree. They aren't common, but the oranges are sweet and delicious.
But what we love most about the tree are the blossoms, promising of spring to come, and reminding us of a special woman, gone now to that place where orange trees blossom all year.
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