Oranges by the Pond

Every Sunday afternoon, I find myself sitting on the back porch, peeling an orange just the way Arthur taught me sixty years ago. The scent alone brings back that summer of 1948, when I was twelve and he was my first real friend.

Arthur's family had the only swimming pool in our county — nothing fancy, just a concrete pond his father had dug behind the house. We spent whole July days there, turning somersaults in the water until our fingers wrinkled like prunes. But the real adventure began each afternoon when Arthur's grandfather would send us to the orange crate by the back door.

"Now you take one each," the old man would say, pressing a piece of fruit into our hands. "This isn't just an orange. It's nature's little vitamin capsule. Good for what ails you, inside and out."

He was a stubborn man, ornery as a field bull, but his heart was pure honey. He'd survived the Great Depression and two wars, and he'd learned what mattered. "Time's the real vitamin," he'd tell us, watching Arthur and me share our oranges by the pool's edge. "You think it'll stretch forever, but it won't. Spend it on what counts."

I learned that lesson the hard way. Arthur died in Vietnam, and that orange tree by his pool succumbed to the winter freeze of '67. But here I am, eighty-two years old with grandchildren of my own, still peeling oranges the way his grandfather showed me.

Sometimes I think about the wisdom we inherit like hand-me-down sweaters — too big at first, then fitting perfectly with time. That old bull of a man knew: friendship is a vitamin, too. It sustains you through the winters of life. It keeps you orange-sweet inside when the world turns cold.

I take another segment of my orange and watch my own granddaughter splash in her little pool, laughing in the July sunshine. Some vitamins, I realize, never expire.