Orange Lessons

 “If you’ve ever been lucky enough to visit an orange grove in March when the trees are in full bloom, then you’ve experienced one of the most delicately beautiful fragrances on earth. There’s really quite nothing like this scent, which is sweet, ethereal and somehow very fresh.” 

My mom reads this to us as we drove through the Florida countryside in early March. As we were driving with the windows down, we all had taken notice of the sweetest scent. It smelled like jasmine and reminded me the month I spent in India. My cousin Cathryn was leaning her head out the window and breathing in deeply, letting out excited proclamations into the sweet air about how good it smelled. We passed by orange trees and felt so humbled to see their growth and smell their sweetness. My mom started googling about orange trees and we found there are a lot of blogs where people love to write about the scent of orange blossoms. We remembered there were jasmine flowers in grandma and grandpa’s front yard and immediately went to smell them when we pulled up back to their house in Bonita Bay. 

On Easter when I went to visit my parents, my mom presented me with a small jar of orange blossom scented body butter she had bought in Florida. I have begun an evening ritual of spreading a small amount across my collarbone and inhaling the sweet scent. The smell of orange blossoms gives me an unfathomable sense of hope for all good things in the world. 

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The last week of April was the last week at my job working with preschoolers on the spectrum. In my time at this clinic I have been introduced to the intense, rhythmic passions of these kiddos - from the ABCs to trains to the months of the year. One of my personal favorites though is The Very Hungry Caterpillar book by Eric Carle. The kids often request to read it, and it has also become a common coping mechanism to give them after they have been dysregulated. It seems they are all soothed by the predictable ritual of the caterpillar’s sequential consumption of different fruits. The hungry caterpillar eats through one apple on Monday and two pears on Tuesday, eventually working up to five oranges by Friday. The classroom I have been working in has been affectionately called the orange room. 

I am always enraptured as I watch one of our client’s snacktime rituals of peeling an orange with his small fingers. His body often moves very quickly and he has an energy inside that he can’t always contain. Yet when tasked with peeling the skin off this fruit, this child stays in his chair and is the most focused I have seen him all day as he removes piece after piece of the peel, knowing his hard work will always yield the sweet fruit. 

Looking back at the pictures my mom took of the orange trees in Florida, I am thinking about their growth. Pushing seeds into the earth is a prayer for predictability - for the predictable turn of the seasons and for the predictable harvest of fruit. 

The clients I work with thrive off predictability. The ordered days of the week, the push of a button on a favorite toy that yields a pop up farm animal, the hungry caterpillar who eats the fruits in this order and this order only, and pop! always becomes a beautiful butterfly. 

As I neared the end of April, I felt like I was drawing closer to a harvest, getting everything in place for when the fruits were ready to be collected. 

I made a social story to read to our clients about my last day, wanting to at least help prepare them in some way for the impending change in the season, providing them with the comfort of rhythms, repetition, and the familiarity of the citrus fruit.  

Bridget has had a lot of fun playing with Orange Room friends.

Soon, Bridget will be all done playing in Orange Room. 

Bridget will miss friends in the Orange Room!

Bridget has ___ more days playing in Orange Room. 

I have gifted myself the month of May off before my next season arrives, and the unpredictability of what lies ahead leaves me feeling uneasy. Earlier this week, I was reading a new memoir written by one of my favorite writers (My Inner Sky by Mari Andrew) and was interested to see one of the chapters was called “Grapefruit Lessons.” The chapter ends with these words:

“How kind of the world to provide abundant citrus during the winter when we are most in need of vitamin C. It makes me believe that nature is on my side. The universe is on my side. My soul is on my side if the orange tree is on my side.”

Here is a little animation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar story which I think is very wholesome and calming.

And of course, a spring playlist that I have called "orange."