Orange Blossoms

I've been loving the fragrance of the orange trees that have begun blooming in our compound over the past week. I know it's no big deal to my family in Arizona, or my friends in Florida and California, who have orange trees everywhere. But to this Ohio born and raised girl, orange trees seem like something out of a Dr. Suess book.

When I first caught a whiff of the orange blossoms about a week ago, I knew it was something wonderful and that I had smelled it somewhere before, but I couldn't place it right away. Then it came to me, and I knew~

It was sometime in March of 1977. I was a sleepy second grader, tumbling out of my uncle's Suburban onto his tree lawn with the rest of my family after being picked up from the airport. We had arrived in Arizona for a visit with our cousins... and what was that heavenly aroma? It was dark out, so I couldn't see very well, but I could certainly smell. The scent of orange blossoms was heavy in the warm evening air, and it seemed other-worldly to a little girl who had come just hours before from one of the legendary Midwest winters of blizzard after blizzard.

I'm sure that visit with my cousins was a blast; I remember that my brother and my two cousins and I each got a stuffed animal in our Easter baskets while we were there. Mine was an elephant that I gave the very original name of Ellie. I think my sister Sarah took some of her first steps at my aunt and uncle's house that year. Other than that, the memories of that visit are lost to me...

...but that first time I smelled the orange blossoms, that has stayed with me, and found me again in China.I took this picture of our neighbor's orange tree sometime in January of this year, looking through the fence from our yard to his. The other two pictures in this post are also of my neighbor's tree.