The Particular Sadness of Oranges (TinyLetter Archive)

Dear friend, 

Most every day for the last week, the air has smelled like flowers. Getting out of my car, walking down the steps from my house, the scent overcomes me. It is unavoidable. And the days it doesn't smell like flowers, it's only because the orange pulp smell has crowded it out. Today as I came back from working at the school, I passed the orange groves, as I do every day. The trees that have been freshly picked burst with green leaves, and the others drag their branches on the ground, so heavy with fruit they can barely lift their limbs. And always there is that one tree: the one that seems dead. It has no leaves or there's only a smattering, brown and shriveled. But there are just as many oranges hanging from its branches as all the other trees. I wonder as I pass if they taste the same, or if the fruit itself bears some tinge of death, decay. 

I am grateful that the tree exists. That no enthusiastic orchard owner has razed it and replaced it with a more supple tree. In some ways, I see it as the Dorian Gray of the groves. It is reflecting the violent truth of its home in the only way that really makes sense here: a rare sweetness produced in what should be barren. I don't know how my students survive it. How so many of them have made it into their teen years without falling into complete despair. Of course, many have. The last few weeks have been chock full of kids being Baker Acted as a result of suicide attempts and overdoses, threats on people's lives, fatal car accidents, and statutory rape/prostitution at a group home. And though they continually buoy me with hope, every day I must bite my tongue to not say GET OUT. Run from this place the day you turn 18--hell, maybe sooner--and never look back. 

Of course I can't say it. Which is one of the reasons I'm leaving. I feel a bitterness settling in me, alongside a particular sadness. To adore these kids like I do and know how much more they deserve that I can't (the school can't) give them...it's part of why I feel no happiness when I see my neighbors' kids playing the backyard. Their laughing and squealing. If I must endure the sight and sounds of happy people when I'm away from school and faced with the town, I feel rage. I can handle only silence. It's too much for there to be both beauty and glee in the midst of so much wrong. 

Love, 

Grrrrrl in the Groves