The Scent of Oranges

by Laura Claridge

Oranges were everywhere in rural Central Florida, polka-dotting the flat fields. I grew up surrounded by citrus trees and the DDT sprays to protect them—and us—from the mosquitoes. I ran through spinning clouds of insecticide, breathing in their toxic sweetness.

Orange growing in Central Florida was dicey; frosts could kill an entire crop. In winter, the stink of gas heaters often overpowered that pervasive citrus scent. And the frostbitten oranges—withered, woody—had their own bitter stink. A queer green-white fungus would crust the skin. But in warm weather, the oranges and their white blossoms emitted an intoxicating perfume that became the very air we breathed.

The olfactory sense is the most powerful in summoning memory. Every time I hold an orange, slice into it, I am propelled back to my Florida childhood. The taste, the juice, releases a dammed flood of recollections…

My paternal grandmother worked as an orange picker. When I went to the cemetery to bury my father, her son, the scent of oranges overpowered me and made me faint by his open grave.

But the most powerful impact of the oranges came much later, when I tracked my mother’s history to the grove where she died.

I have a curious past with my mother, Camille. She had begun her life as a wild, teenaged heiress who bought and flew her own plane. But her early marriage seemed to clip her wings. Her first marriage failed, while she was still a girl but the mother of two tiny sons. She fled that first husband, had an affair with the handsome war hero who was to be my father. She conceived me on the lam from respectability and abandoned me almost immediately.

My birth created a deep division in her own life. She had divorced her sons’ father and married my father, only to divorce him, too. I was born out of wedlock between her two marriages. And she no sooner gave birth to me, married my father, than she returned to her first husband, deciding he was the love of her life.

That first husband, Avery, was an orange farmer, and by all family accounts, he welcomed my mother back and would have been glad to raise me, her infant daughter. But my mother refused and my father’s mother, the orange picker, was summoned to collect the week-old baby and fly back to Pinellas with me as somewhat unwanted carry-on baggage.

I never again saw my mother, Camille, after that…

It was only after her death at fifty-four that I felt compelled to trace her, and I found her—in her obituary.

She had remarried her first husband, Avery, and invested her inheritance in his orange grove. That grove may have been a money drain, less than a fountain of honey-tangeloed profit. They struggled; he lost the farm, but when the next owner failed, her husband reacquired the orchard and groomed ever more vibrant varieties of large, sweet oranges. His orange orchard was composed of forty acres of prime citrus trees that he was said to take pride in as a “showplace.” He was so proud of Avery Groves, how neat they appeared, when heavily laden with flower and fruit; how they went white in spring with fragrant blossoms; and then dotted bright orange in early winter.

Camille’s last known address, the place where she died, was Avery Road, in the center of their orange orchard. Her husband had built her small, dream house there, and it was said that she loved it more than any place on earth… The orange grove was described as a sanctuary with the pretty little white house, hidden by the trees, a polka-dotted, fragrant paradise. In her obituary, Camille is described as retreating to the veranda to inhale the citrus scent, to read away her days on her porch rocker, rocking and praying.

Her husband, Avery, took care of my mother in her final illness, ovarian cancer: the tumor described as the size of an orange, the cancer inherited or caused by the heavy drafts of DDT that had wafted around her all her life. There was a lot of pain, and in her obituary, her husband is described as practicing the needed injections of morphine by first sticking the syringes into the flesh of his oranges.

He outlived her by forty years, and died recently at ninety-four; he had taken another wife, and raised thousands more oranges. Avery was described as a fitness devotee who swam for hours every morning and ran laps down the lanes between his trees. He was also pious and sang gospel hymns at the nearby fundamentalist church. My mother, too, was described as a devout evangelical Christian, as well as a dedicated golfer. The wild girl, the teenage pilot, had disappeared long before her death.

Reading the details in the newspaper archive, it was hard to find the young girl who flew a plane, married and divorced two men in three years, and had several babies she abandoned—the woman who breathed her last surrounded by those orange trees. But, I think of her every time I cut into an orange, divide its segments, and inhale its scent, the bitter with the sweet.

BIO: Laura Claridge has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, including the story of an American icon, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners (Random House), for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress, administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Born in Clearwater, Florida, Laura Claridge received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and Literary Theory from the University of Maryland in 1986. She taught in the English departments at Converse and Wofford colleges in Spartanburg, SC, and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997.

She has been a frequent writer and reviewer for the national press, appearing in such newspapers and magazines as The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her books have been translated into Spanish, German, and Polish. She has appeared frequently in the national media, including NBC, CNN, BBC, CSPAN, and NPR and such widely watched programs as the Today Show.

Laura Claridge’s biography of iconic publisher Blanche Knopf, The Lady with the Borzoi, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April 2016.

Laura Claridge and her husband live in New York’s Hudson Valley.