I spent the week in a borrowed cottage surrounded by orange trees, in a neighborhood of citrus orchards. Many trees were still in bloom. I ate orange segments for snacks, I squeezed oranges into evening drinks. I saw a lot of oranges, thought about oranges, read about oranges, and here are 16 things I thought about or learned:
Rarely is an orange perfectly round
An orange is better smelled than eaten, in my opinion
An orange is a cup of holy water for some people, my mother, for example
Oranges are what some of yesterday’s children received from Santa Claus, and that’s it, and maybe it was enough?
An orange can be a miniature sun: is the easiest thing to imagine about an orange
An orange is a lemon blushing
I was on a walk and picked up an old orange on the ground, it was rancid with mold, the smell reminded me of the couple times I’ve been up close with dead people
My mother had a rough week and she loves oranges, especially Valencias, so I cut a bunch of Valencia oranges from my friends’ trees, packed them in a box and mailed them to her, and I don’t know there’s much better, in her mind, that I could have done as the occasionally dutiful son
The color orange suggests papaya, tiger, caution
Here are some names of Valencia varieties: Belladonna. Narinja. Shamouti. Queen.
The word sporange refers to a botanical structure that creates spores—and here you thought the orange, rhyming-wise, was all alone
Sweet oranges, the oranges best known to American supermarkets, first appeared in Chinese literature in 314 BC. I dug around and couldn’t find out what was said in 314 BC, but John McPhee once wrote an entire book about oranges and orange farms and juice (I started it, I didn’t make it past 60 pages), which stemmed from a very long 1966 article in The New Yorker (started it, didn’t finish), and he said:
The word “orange” evolved from Sanskrit. The Chinese word for orange, in ancient as well as modern Chinese, is jyu, but it did not migrate with the fruit. India was the first major stop in the westward travels of citrus, and the first mention of oranges in Sanskrit literature is found in a medical book called the “Charaka-Samhita,” which was compiled approximately two thousand years ago. The Hindus called an orange a naranga, the first syllable of which, according to Tolkowsky, was a prefix meaning fragrance. This became the Persian naranj, a word the Muslims carried through the Mediterranean. In Byzantium, an orange was a nerantzion. This, in Neo-Latin, became variously styled arangium, arantium, and aurantium—eventually producing naranja in Spain, laranja in Portugal, arancia in Italy, and orange in France.
For Europeans, oranges were first popular as décor, for aroma in a drawing room, and for seasoning, squeezed or grated
According to Wikipedia, the first major pest that attacked orange trees in the United States was “the cottony cushion scale.” The cottony cushion scale!
My least favorite candy flavor, any candy, is orange. Gross. Imitation orange flavor tastes the way rancid oranges smell, at least to me
Thursday morning, I randomly read a poem in the morning that referred to a basket of oranges as “a bittersweet gold mine.” That’s pretty good.
I once ate a slice of meskouta, an orange tea cake, at a small hotel in Morocco, with a cup of coffee, and it was goddamn gorgeous
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Custom, practically haute couture gear and clothes for exploring the alpine (or to look like you’re going to explore the alpine)
New movies I’m excited about, via trailers
The best of the week in online weird (a Jeff Bezos rowboat!), and more
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Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly mini-essay from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, plus a monthly dispatch from the road, for some inbox wanderlust ⛰️
Rosecrans is the author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. His most recent novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Titles mentioned in this newsletter are stored on a Bookshop list, which pays a commission for any books sold