Tangerine Teachings

I remember the trees of my childhood, five of them already planted as part of the San Diego tract home my Mom and step-dad bought in the mid ’60s.

The dwarf tangerine is the one I loved most. It stood alone near the northeast corner of our postage-stamp-sized backyard amid an expanse of scruffy, usually sun-dried grass. I grew up with that tree. Our black collie, Duffy, and I would chase each other around it when I was five.

At age six or seven, I learned the tree held an amazing secret: the seasonal transformation of tiny, hard, green balls into pliable orange fruits big enough to get my fist around. The flowers, white and fragrant, would crumple to a creamy brown and drop to darken into the earth. Then this little green ball would start up where each flower had been. The size of a pea, the color of the leaves. Sometimes I could find only a few, unless I looked really, really hard. In just a few weeks, I would spot them in all kinds of sizes.

I’d study them in all their stages of change. First green as Mexican limes, they’d blush to half-orange, half-green, then one sunny day there’d be nothing but bright orange rounds in the heart of the branches. The tree never looked like those pictures we all drew as kids—a big green circle with orange dots all over it. Instead, the fruit nestled in among the branches, hid under the leaves, hugged the trunk. Even though the orange was so bright, I was often surprised at how many I missed from one day to the next.

I remember being afraid to pick and eat the fruit at first. Was it OK to do? Was it safe? Could I really eat these pretty mini-orange sections? Mom said yes. The tangerines had lots of seeds. I didn’t like that. They weren’t always sweet or juicy, either. We didn’t water the tree much. Like the kids and the pets, the tree was left pretty much to fend for itself with whatever the elements would give it. Benign neglect was big in those days.

Picking the tangerines was easy. The tree was a dwarf variety, and even I could reach up into its middle with my little-kid height. Sometimes I’d get so many tangerines I couldn’t hold them all. Then I’d fold up the front of my T-shirt and carry them in a stretchy basket.

I learned they were ripe when just a nudge would drop them into my hand. If I had to pull too hard, the rind would rip, and the fruit wouldn’t be as tasty because it hadn’t been ready to come away from the tree.

Life can be a lot like that—push it, struggle to pluck its goodness, and you never end up with the best that it could have been. But let it ripen on its own, give it the least little prod, and all that we need falls into our hands in its own perfect time. No struggle. No coaxing. Just life at its best—ripe, ready, full of juice. For me, that tree was abundance.

At ten, I remember reading that you can splice trees together—graft them—so that one kind of tree could be made to grow from another. I once took a knife to the side of the trunk and tried to graft a lemon branch to it, but the add-on died. A botanical Dr. Frankenstein I was not.

The tangerine tree is gone now—cut down two or three years ago to convert the always-scraggly yard into a lovely sanctuary of rose bushes, white rock, curvy tiled benches, and stepping stones studded with butterflies and frogs. While the yard makeover is beautiful, I do still miss that friendly tangerine tree and its sweet little surprises hidden in the branches.