Summer of 2010 or 2011ish
We made it. My grandpa and my great uncle and I had just driven down to Phoenix from Kansas city, and it was quite the ride. All along the way they'd remind each other where it was safe to speed and where it wasn't. "Oh, don't speed through here! Remember that one time we got that $900 ticket? They mean business here." and sometime later one would say, "Alright, we're good for the next 40 miles. Let's get going!" And so it went the entire way down. They've probably spent a small or medium-sized fortune in speeding tickets over the years, but at least now they're pretty good about not getting caught. I sat in the middle of the pickup truck the whole way down since I was the smallest, and listened to many a story of way-back-when or, if it wasn't that, it was talking about whatever politics Rush Limbaugh was railing about at the time. Besides getting hit by a cherry-picker truck at a gas station, it was a pretty great trip. Not that getting hit by the truck was a bad thing. Little thirteen-year-old me thought it was pretty great, especially the rush of seeing the truck approaching our cab and head straight for us. That was the best. Uncle Don tried to dodge him, but he couldn't get it in reverse fast enough, and... crunch! Both trucks stopped. Grandpa and Uncle Don immediately found their insurance information and started going over all the details of what happened and rehearsed their story to be sure to get it right. After decades of experience, Grandpa knew exactly what to do to get the payout that was inevitable, and he even got the license plate number in case the driver drove off before we got his insurance information. (Actually that was the first thing they did. I read and continually repeated the license number while they scrambled for pen and paper and recorded it.) Well, the driver was very apologetic about messing up our front end, and we got his information and that was that. On the way down Grandpa called the insurance company to get everything arranged. And they payed up too. No insurance company could get past Grandpa when he was barking up their tree!
And so we made it to Phoenix. Uncle Don had several trees in his backyard, as well as three cows and a bull. We walked out to the trees. And oh! They were so pretty! It was my first time seeing real citrus trees in action. There were grapefruit trees, lemon trees, and orange trees! I didn't know which one to run up to first. Which utterly delightful fruit should I bite into first? I didn't know, and I still don't know. The grapefuits were twice the size of my fist, and the oranges and lemons only slightly smaller. And then I took up an orange. It was a good and decent weight, with a good healthy peel on it. I sunk my fingers into it, and was surprised at how thick the peel was. It came off easily, in big playful chunks. The wedges were so big, and the little capsules with the juice in them were so large, that you could almost eat them one at a time if you had the patience. I did not have the patience. My teeth plunged into the sweetness, and I couldn't help but smile at the orangyness of it. It was perfect.
I picked as much fruit as I could carry, and brought it inside to the kitchen table. Uncle Don introduced me to eating grapefruit with sugar, and it was pretty good. He even had special spoons for it! And then, the lemons. I'd never seen such humongous lemons in my life. When I took my first deep bite of lemon, my face puckered up tighter than fallen plum on a scalding August day. And it was so good. I ate the whole thing, much to the amusement of Grandpa and Uncle Don.
That was my first real experience in Arizona. Sure, I'd been there at least once when I was real little, but this was the first time that I really remembered well. I spent a solid summer month living with my Grandpa, and pretty much every day we'd swing by McDonald's and Grandpa would get a senior coffee and a sausage biscuit, and I'd usually get two breakfast burritos. I spent most business hours in his insurance office during the day doing school or playing minesweeper and spider solitaire and other such computer games. I also prowled the parking lots and put insurance advertisements on each car windshield I could find. Soon enough I learned not to put advertisements on the windshield when a person was sitting inside. Evidently people don't take to that too kindly... hahae. The afternoon would always find me swimming in the pool in his backyard. It was on the miniature divingboard that I completed my first ever backflip. I was so excited! In the evening we'd eat dinner, sometimes pizza that we ordered, or hamburgers and onions and baked beans that Grandpa cooked up, or something else. We'd eat it while watching the news, or, more often, and more exciting for me, NCIS. And so it went.
By and by it was time for me to leave, but, since we'd driven down and I was flying back, I hadn't brought any of my stuff in a bag that I could take on the plane. So we went to Big Lots and Grandpa bought me a nice little brown suitcase with roller wheels on the back and a pullout handle for $15. After all these years I still have it. I used it just three months ago in fact. It's slowly breaking and stands lopsided, and the plastic is brittle and breaking and the handle barely goes up and down anymore, but it's still hanging on a while longer. Before we drove to the airport, we stopped by Uncle Don's to stock up on citrus, and that was that. I made it back just in time for the potato harvest and setting up more fence, and life soon returned to normal again.
It'd be several years before I would again set foot in Arizona. By that time the lemon trees were dead, the grapefruit trees dying, and the orange trees not producing quite like they used to. But there would always remain a soft spot in my heart for Arizona citrus. Especially the oranges, and especially the lemons. Nowhere else has lemons so delicious nor oranges so sweet.
No comments:
Post a Comment