oranges from Spain

Yesterday I was shopping in a grocery store in Sechelt, the old one that’s been there for as long as I’ve lived on the Coast, and longer. I was putting a bag of organic carrots in my cart when I suddenly smelled oranges. Not just any oranges but clementines, from Spain. I love these small bright oranges. Years ago, in Paris, I was walking with my friend Anik and we were so taken by the scent of them that we followed our noses and found a woman near the Bastille, a table in front of her heaped with beautiful clementines from Sicily. We bought some and ate them happily as we continued our walk. Yesterday I remembered that as I chose some of the fruit with their stems and leaves still attached. I’ve just eaten one and it’s what I need (maybe you do too?) to transport me away from the melting snow and cold air of January.

Many years ago, in January, I was staying with friends in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and it was the first time I’d seen orange trees growing in a garden. It wasn’t warm, not really, though I did join my host one morning in a swim below the house. What I remember vividly is sitting at the little desk by the window of my room, watching the housekeeper pick oranges first thing one morning, and I remember the scent of something cooking later that day and how a small dish of marmalade appeared on the breakfast table the next morning, the garden oranges transformed with sugar and a long simmer. On the instructions of my host, I’d ridden a bike into Monte Carlo that morning for baguettes and it was on a section of one of those baguettes that I spread sweet butter and a spoonful of marmalade. I’ve never forgotten.

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone.

I’m waiting for the Seville oranges to appear in the grocery store so I can make our winter sunlight. I have some Meyer lemons to slice up with oranges and when I see the jars on the shelf in the porch, along with the jams of last summer–blackberry & lavender (made with my granddaughter), blueberry (made with my oldest grandson), peach, rose-petal, and Chardonnay grape jelly flavoured with rosemary and fiery peppers–I feel wealthy beyond words. I feel wealthy to have known a garden in France with oranges growing in January and to have eaten marmalade made from them on baguettes from a bakery in Monte Carlo on the morning of my 21st birthday, wealthy to have chosen 8 beautiful clementines from a tumbled bin in a grocery store in Sechelt, wealthy to have in my immediate future the prospect of eating oranges in Portugal and Spain while frost covers every surface here at home.

It’s cold today. My hands won’t warm up. I’ve been working at my desk but dreaming of narrow streets leading to a table of oranges, a woman with an apron choosing some while I found euros in my pocket, dreaming of waking in Spain to oranges and dark coffee and warmth.

I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

Note: the lines of poetry are from Gary Soto’s “Oranges”.