Florida Oranges

For some reason, I was always adamant about getting out of South Florida for college. “OK, so where do you want to go? FSU, UF, UCF?” my family asked. But I was looking a bit farther afield than Gainesville. I had my sights set on the wilds of western Massachusetts.

“Pero porque?” my Cuban family cried. “Florida has great colleges! Why do you need to leave?” They could not fathom how I could possibly leave this place, this city that they had inhabited with such gusto after leaving Cuba as political exiles decades before. Miami was their home, and they had no intention of ever leaving. Well, maybe to visit some relatives in Hialeah…

I, on the other hand, was enamored with the idea of New England and all that it stood for. The ivory tower of academia, afternoon rambles through forested hills, sipping apple cider and watching the leaves fall. I soaked it in, attending as many lectures as humanly possible and jumping into giant leaf piles. I was one of those silly kids running out of my dorm in my pajamas to catch the first taste of snow on my tongue, along with Texans and Californians. After heavy snowfalls, I gleefully stole a plastic tray from the dining hall, along with the rest of the student body, to use as a sliding device on the biggest hill in town.

Needless to say, I never minded coming home for the holidays. Christmas break always came with impeccable timing, just when winter was beginning to wear down my soul, when the snow had begun to look like cold mud, when I could count the number of daylight hours on one hand. As soon as my exams were through, I had the good fortune of spending six blissful weeks soaking up the sunshine and swimming in the sea, chastising my family whenever they complained that 60 degrees was “cold.”

Of course, it was never hard to convince visitors to come down for a visit. One spring break, my friends and I boarded the last plane leaving Hartford airport before shutting down for a snow storm. Within two hours, we went from a barren frozen tundra to a sun-soaked paradise. When I introduced my friends to my family, my great aunt exclaimed – “No nos dijistes que tus amigas eran asiaticas!” You didn’t tell us your friends were Asians! I … didn’t know I had to?

During that visit, one of these Asian ladies struck up friendly conversation with my dad about Florida oranges.

“Florida oranges are mainly for the juice,” my foreign father explained.

My friend gave him a quizzical expression. “I know there are a lot of Jews in Florida, but why do they need all the oranges?” she asked.

Now it was my father’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “You need oranges to make juice,” he pressed, the confusion showing in his voice.

This went on for a little while, until the hilarity of the situation dawned on my friend and she backed away slowly. “Carmella,” she whispered to me, mortified. “Your dad thinks I’m crazy!”

Back in the Pioneer Valley, I started getting fanatical about the inadequacies of our national food system. Luckily, the region I was living in was a hotbed of local foods and organic farming. But every time I came home, I always got a healthy dose of reality.

At the Winn-Dixie down the street from my parent’s house, I was aghast to find South African oranges for sale. I asked the guy stacking potatoes to please fetch his manager.

“What can I help you with, senorita?” he asked.

“This orange is from South Africa!” I said to him, waving the offending orange in his face.

“ But what’s wrong with it, Miss?” he asked, genuinely perplexed, trying his best to understand my concern.

“We live in Florida!” I yelled at him, before stomping away without buying anything.

Another time, I passed a roadside stand with a man selling mamoncillos. I pulled over eagerly.

“Did you grow these in your garden?” I asked him in Spanish, unable to contain my excitement. Again, another look of confusion.

“No, I got them off a barge in the port of Miami,” he told me, unapologetically. “I’ve got no idea who grew them.”

I drove away, dejection welling up inside of me. What was wrong with these people?

Back in New England, people spoke my language. I could use the term “post-petroleum society” without having to explain it. Potlucks were extravagant affairs of over-the-top foodie dishes comprised of as much locally-grown produce as possible. I bartered with friends for anything and everything, trading baked goods for massages or Asian pear jam for fresh goat cheese. I knew the farmer who raised the beef I consumed, and I’d walked the pastures where they had spent their days before becoming my dinner.

But then something happened. It started as a strange whisper, a small inkling that maybe something was not right. Reggaeton blasting from a passing car made me feel a pang of nostalgia. Frequent calls home made me realize that I was actually missing my nagging, nosy relatives who always knew what was going on in everyone’s lives and, of course, had an opinion about everything.

As it turns out, I was tired of sautéing wild-harvested fiddleheads in local garlic scapes and making jerky out of roadkill. I missed the warmth of my hometown and the straightforward way of my people that could be called ignorance or maybe just blatant political incorrectness. I missed the looks of wild confusion from the store clerk when I’d refuse a plastic bag. My grandfather would tell me to “Take the bag, Carmella. It’s free!” Could it be that I was tired of being one in thousands of life-minded foodie freaks living in an increasingly tiny valley?

After a particularly painful early-season snow storm, I packed my car with all the vestiges of my New England life – jars of home-grown fruit and vegetable preserves, bags of dried plants harvested from the woods, a feather from a rooster I had killed to make soup – and headed south.

One of the first things I did when I settled into my new old home was plant a garden in my front lawn. With my New England seeds in hand, I applied what I had learned up north to this new land. Much to my dismay, my plants did not fare well that first season. The spinach bolted, the cucumbers withered, and the garlic wouldn’t bulb. It was the wrong season, the wrong varieties, the wrong timing, the wrong crops altogether.

Over time, I found locals who were willing to share their knowledge of growing food in South Florida with me. Little by little, I found the right varieties for zone 10b. I began to notice what time of year the jasmine plants flowered and when the loquat trees would drip with fruit. I knew where to stop for a banana snack on my morning walk, and which star fruit tree yielded the sweetest specimen.

Next thing you know, I’m trading fresh sourdough for hand-whipped body products and bundles of rosemary appear on my front porch, a gift from a gardener friend passing through the neighborhood. These days, my dehydrator is filled with mangos and papayas, and I feel blessed to live in this land of exotic oranges and crazy drivers.