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As the title of this post would not let anybody guess, I am back on this site after a 17-month hiatus. I am also back in my hometown of Paris, France - not hanging out in Palermo or Syracuse, as much as I would like to. We’ll come to this orange business later, but for now let’s just say that I am finally getting back on my feet after a long year of upheaval, which kept me away from my keyboard and any semblance of personal projects.
After twenty-one years spent in New York City, where I landed exactly three weeks before September 11, as a young twenty-something eager for a break from French academia, I said goodbye to the city I loved and where my four children were born. It was the hardest decision of my life, or maybe one of the two hardest – there will definitely be more on this in a future post,- and I think I still haven’t quite felt all its repercussions. New York was my home, a home that I chose and where I felt more comfortable than in my official hometown, in many respects. But it had become too challenging to live there as a large family and with great sadness on my part, we had to say goodbye for the time being. Taking my kids away from a city they loved and a school environment they cherished was by far the most painful thing I ever had to do, and I still feel pangs of guilt about it every day. I do remain in awe of the patience, acceptation, and resilience they have showed over the past seven months. In many respects they have shown much more maturity and adaptability than I have. But my fourteen-year-old son and his seven-year-old brother have been struggling with the stricter, somewhat more punitive school system they have found here, and miss their friends dearly.
For different reasons that have to do with my own family history, but also my own complicated relationship with the French education system, I have also been having a hard time, and definitely not always shown up as the mother I would like to be. After being busy settling down, furnishing an almost empty apartment, and dealing with all the administrative demands of re-patriation – and there are SO many-, I woke up in January in a kind of a daze, realizing suddenly that my life was indeed here now. I started missing New York acutely, even unbearably at times, followed by random visions of my former life as I was walked around my new city. My daughter doing the heart sign with her hands from the school bus window in the morning. Her braids flapping about in her back as I watched her walking to her classroom, while feeling mildly sick from my fourth pregnancy. My two younger sons sledding down a hill in Central Park after what seemed to be a cataclysmic snowstorm. The big Thanksgiving tables at my husband’s aunt’s appartement on the Upper West Side. My early morning summer runs in Central Park, when I hated the humidity with my whole being but felt so proud for finally getting up at sunrise in order to mitigate it – something I would never, ever consider in any other season or any kind of European dry-heat summer. Driving up to Vermont in the Winter to bravely, or foolishly, try to attempt skiing in sub-zero temperatures and running out of the car with squeals of delight to avoid freezing in place.
I would be walking down the street in Paris and suddenly find myself in the middle of Manhattan, with cars honking and firetrucks sounding like a louder version of my son’s toys, my heart racing at the thought of soon picking up my children from school and seeing their smiley faces through the glass doors. My mind was so much in New York that for a few weeks between New Year’s and, well, quite recently, I felt absolutely incapable of enjoying anything Paris has to offer – which, many people will agree, is a lot. The museums and exhibits I avidly explored in the Fall seemed too didactic, the “jardins” not big enough and not measuring up to Central Park’s majestic openness; the food, even, was becoming too much, and the displays of delicate pastries and fancy chocolates (fancy chocolate stores have sprouted up all over the city since I left it and even since my last summer visit), made me want to eat nothing but salad and fruit for the rest of my life. I was even getting blasé with the farmer’s markets, which were a joy to explore over my first three months in the city.
That is, until I encountered the Sicilian orange.
I love a good citrus in the winter, and while living on the other side of the Atlantic, the Cara Cara oranges I would find at Trader Joe’s for a few weeks in February, were good enough that they tricked me into thinking that good fruit could occasionally be enjoyed in New York, however furtively. But there was nothing furtive about the abundance of Spanish clementines, mandarins, blood oranges and other orange-hued citrus that started appearing on Parisian markets’ stalls around the holidays. I didn’t pay attention to them at first, barely registering the orange spots that were an expected feature of any market outings. Clementines had been on display since my first days in Paris, at the beginning of September.
But on a dreary January morning, as I was mechanically buying some of those clementines, which were finally genuinely in season, and which my little boys devour without the sense of obligation they seem to feel about other, less colorful fruit, a larger, plumper beauty with gnarly dark green foliage caught my attention. Before even looking at it closer, the name of it on the chalk board -“Oranges, Sicile,- ” was an invitation to travel. The skies, and my general mood, had been so obstinately grey since November, that the bright orange and deep green were enough to cheer me up right away. I just had to taste this orange, which I did immediately upon getting home, without taking the time to unwrap and unpack my other acquisitions, as I often do when I come back from errands and get overly excited about something I bought.
The orange, let me say, was just as delicious as it looked. One mouthful and my sense of taste was reborn, the same way that I would remember what a tomato is supposed to taste like when I ate one from my grandfather’s garden as a child. Juicy and sweet, but also delicately tangy, it was an explosion of sun in my mouth - a little bit of Syracuse in Paris, a sultry summer afternoon tearing through the dirty cotton skies.
The Sicilian orange showed me a way out of my melancholy and led me back to this site. For this alone I remain grateful to it – or her?, orange is feminine in French-, and hope to keep this simple fruit as an inspiration.
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