Cautionary citrus

I am not a lawbreaker.  I hesitate to break most rules, in fact. Unless they bother me. Or I think they're unfair. Or they get in the way of the cranberry orange muffins I didn't know I wanted until I saw fresh citrus almost within my grasp. OKAY FINE. Ya got me. What's that statement they ask on personality assessments? "I sometimes think the rules don't apply to me." I may be more of a rebel than you'd think. Don't worry though, my days of being a hardened criminal are over and done with (. . . slash never lived).




I was walking with my friends in sunny Phoenix and the siren smell of orange blossoms called to me.

Seriously though. Forget roses. Stop and smell the orange blossoms!

I figure it's public fruit, right? Along a public road, in front of a row of apartments. Rationalizing is a specialty of mine. Anyway, this tragic citrus experience may have scared me straight, y'all. These oranges were full of deception.

Fragrant, lumpy jewels. Would you just look at the promise of them?

I had a tough time convincing everyone that I wasn't committing a minor crime by picking the fruit, but, what can I say? My friends are thick-and-thin types. They'll always be there to help me bury the peels and stash the zester.

You look at this picture and immediately know that you're looking at a group of potential lawbreakers.
I KID! I KID! They've never so much as jaywalked, I promise you. They're clean as a whistle,
with rap sheets as long (and as real) as a ladybug's eyelash.

I immediately dug into the oranges when we got back from our day of engaging in the typical nefarious activities you'd expect from six women with a combined total of half a century's worth of higher education among them (lunch, pedicures, gelato--yeah, you can tell we're six tattoos short of a biker gang). I thoroughly scrubbed the oranges with a sponge and a little dish soap to make sure there was no lingering residue and then I zested them.

This is where the wheels started to come off the wagon. Now, let me preface what comes next with the fact that I don't have much experience with citrus fruits. You don't get those kinds of trees growing in Kansas, where I grew up. We're more corn, cow, and apple folks. So maybe I shouldn't have been as incredibly disappointed by the innards of these oranges as I was?

Disappointment. Sour, bitter disappointment.

They were shriveled and weird-looking enough for the doubt to start kicking in. What if the zest was no good to use either? What if the oranges had soaked up all the exhaust and fumes from the cars zooming down the four-lane road next to the trees? What if I fed my friends poisoned muffins, Evil Queen style, because I used (allegedly) illicit citrus that I plucked from tainted trees? Yeah, the oranges totally psyched me out.

So . . . Cautionary citrus. I ended up throwing the zest and oranges away. All the dish soap in the world couldn't wash away my extreme disappointment. I think my friends breathed a sigh of relief. Though they would have been trusting enough to eat the muffins, I think they'd have been bracing themselves for some serious food poisoning from my (allegedly!) ill-gotten gains.

"That'll teach her," the oranges thought maliciously.