Reliving Slow Summers, Heaven Scent

I didn’t see the trees, but I smelled them.

I was on my way to an afternoon appointment, scurrying through Cal State Northridge under last week’s too-hot spring sun, sticky in my winter clothes.

Soon, my walking slowed and images brushed my mind as light as butterflies.

I thought of drowsy afternoons in Yucaipa, the sun-stunned desert town where I grew up. I heard the familiar, lazy rustle of trees in the wind, felt gnats tickling my ears.

Stopping to gulp the air, I realized it was a smell that had dredged these memories, so unexpected and startlingly specific. I closed my eyes and searched out their source.

I finally noticed the trees at the edge of campus. They were full of tiny, white flowers that filled the air with perfume.

The orange blossoms were back.

Rewind to age 9 or 10. A parched afternoon ride home after school. It was the day I first noticed--truly comprehended and marveled at--nature’s change of seasons.

As a little girl growing up in a land where dramatic shows of weather are scarce, I was hardly aware that the seasons changed. My brother and sister and I had no winter boots, no hats or gloves, no umbrellas. There were no weather-specific sports, such as hockey or ice skating, that made us notice climate changes.

Sure, the ancient oak trees that cradled our house dumped acorns on us in the fall. In the high desert winter, frequent overnight ice killed Dad’s plants and made the roads slick. And, of course, the summers were as dry and paralyzingly hot as a furnace. No ignoring that.

Still, I was a child of Southern California and I grew up nearly oblivious to weather cycles--until Mom made me notice the orange blossoms. It was a spring afternoon around 1980, already too hot for my jacket, which I stuffed into my school bag on the bus ride home from Catholic school.

Mom met my sister and me in the parking lot of St. Francis X. Cabrini church and, after a ritual fight over the front seat, we piled into her cherry-red VW bus and headed home. But instead of turning up the hill toward Oak Grove Road, she took an unfamiliar turn.

“I want to show you something,” she said. “Just wait and see.”

I was hot and tired and not in the mood for one of Mom’s so-called adventures. My sweaty legs stuck to the VW’s white vinyl seats. My sister and I probably began to whine somewhere around Crafton Hills College, on the edge of town.

“Can’t we stop and get a Slurpee from 7-Eleven or a Popsicle from the dairy?” we probably moaned. We wanted something cool to make us forget the hot air that blew like oven fumes through the car.

“Just wait and see where we’re going,” Mom said, her voice confident enough to make me dubious. We puttered and shifted gears out of Yucaipa and into the back roads of Redlands and Mentone. Within a few minutes, we pulled over.

I peered through the van’s red, white and blue curtains--the ones Mom had sewn herself that year. But I saw nothing in the flat, empty road.

“What?” I said. There was not a person or building or car in sight. Just rows and rows of trees. “Well, what is it?”

“Smell,” said Mom, grinning.

I took a whiff. It was like dipping my tongue in a cup of honey, so tantalizing, overpowering, candy-sweet. Almost sickening.

We scrambled out of the car, plopping our tennis shoes in the dust in the middle of a 100-year-old orange grove at the peak of spring.

Palm trees, their tops beyond my view, lined the road deep into the distance, guarding acres of densely planted orange trees on either side of the road. The world seemed silent and still thanks to those trees, which muffled all noise save the buzz-buzz of newly hatched bugs and the whisper of leaves in the faint breeze.

Tiny, white flowers, hundreds on a branch, frosted each orange tree for miles around. The place was the sound stage for a fairy tale. Its scent, so strong it made the air heavy, soaked into our hair, our skin, our wrinkled school clothes.

The trees had already produced some fruit, and we gathered the fallen oranges in our shirts, hurling them at one another and watching their pulpy innards ooze out beneath our feet.

We jumped to grab the tiny, white flowers. My sister stuck them in her curly hair, looking like a princess. My hair was too stringy to hold them, so I stuck them in my blouse, my shoes, my waistband.

I was amazed that any place outside a department store perfume aisle could harbor such a forceful aroma, almost too deliberately innocent and saccharine to be believed. Mom said the blossoms only came once a year, and then only for a few weeks. To each one belonged the formula to make an orange.

I was impressed.

The smell, and those images of a secret place of only fruit and flowers wedged itself into my mind forever. From then on, the fragrance announced to me that the long, monochrome days of summer were within reach.

Summer. It was the best thing in the world.

Some years, a winter frost lost its way and came back to town for a few days or a week. Then, the orange growers would stay up all night fueling portable heaters to protect their precious trees from frostbite.

But, almost always, the orange blossoms promised sun, sun and more searing sun. And, more important, no school, no early mornings, nothing to do. On those baking summer days, I could borrow five, six, seven books at a time from the library and pore through them all, long before they were due.

My brother and sister and I could coast our bikes eight miles down to Grandma’s house to eat cookies and watch soap operas and then call Dad to beg a ride back up the hill. We could make our way to our cousins’ house to dunk in their pool, where chickens and horses shared the dusty yard. Wet and shivering, we’d sprawl out in the white-bright rays to bake dry, then dunk in the cool water again. We could retreat indoors to play Barbie for hours on end and, wearing swimsuits all day long, sit glass-eyed and heavy-limbed through TV game shows.

The first day of school was an eternity away.

Summer was wonderful, but monotonous. I complained bitterly that Yucaipa was boring, a dull, hick town. And it probably was--it still is.

But the real action was simply too subtle for me to notice: nature’s quiet, gradual shifts, punctuated by occasional bursts of orange-blossomed energy. And my own slow growth from a shy bookworm into an outspoken woman who loves going back to that tiny, semirural place.

Now, as I inhale the scent of orange blossoms in the spring, I slip back into those easy summers in Yucaipa.

I am happy that I recognize the smell.