Monday, January 11, 2010

Naranja


Naranja. I believe that is the spanish word for orange. Having grown up in rural New York, on my trips to Florida with my parents on vacation I was always fascinated by orange trees. I assume that southerners may well have been fascinated by the apple trees where I lived. But the oranges were always so colorful.

And those little roadside juice stands advertising all of the orange juice that you can drink for ten cents or a quarter. It was fresh squeezed orange juice also. Squeezed on the spot right in front of use. Oranges taken out of a cooler, cut in half, and placed into a large hand press with a very long handle for leverage with the juice trickling out of a spigot into the waiting glass. Now isn’t that what Florida is really all about?

Well this is the year of the big freeze. Here is an orange tree where the oranges turned black on what looks to be a dead tree.

The red object in the middle of the picture is a sprinkler for trying to save the oranges. The water from the sprinkler froze into a lot of ice at the base of the tree.

There were numerous young trees in this orchard and they were surrounded by ice from the water being sprayed on them by the sprinklers.

All of the tree had the ice around their base from the sprinklers. I wonder by how much the price of orange juice will go up? I don’t drink the orange juice that often. And besides, when it comes to orange juice I only like the “not from concentrate” type. I find the frozen orange juices to be a bit acidic. Besides we are growing our own orange tree in the backyard. In a few days the temperature will be back up into the 70’s and I will put on my shirt will the palm trees on it and start humming the tune Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet. I just wanted folks in places like Long Island and Logan to know that they aren’t the only ones having cold weather. It’s just that in a few days they will probably still be waist deep in snow and I will be sitting in the back yard in a lawn chair with my sun glasses on watching the hamburgers cooking on the grill. Isn’t Florida great? Now if only I could get to the beach. Lew

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