Ode to the Orange

I've got this thing about oranges.

Maybe it's because the smell of them was so much a part of my childhood. The thickly sweet fragrance of blossoms drifting through my bedroom window on cold, crisp January nights is one of my favorite memories.

The slightly fermented odor of an over-ripe tangerine hitting me in the face during the Florida equivalent of a snowball fight is another less pleasant, yet still powerful one.

Maybe a love for the fruit is in my blood.

My great-grandparents worked in Central Florida packing houses from the 1920s through the 1940s, sorting and packing the bright orange globes, which were often bound north for gift baskets and the toes of Christmas stockings.

But the last few decades have brought sad times for Central Florida orange lovers.

A series of hard freezes in the 1980s turned thousands of acres of local groves into gnarled, leafless gray sticks. The scent of orange blossoms in winter is fainter now. And the sight of row after row of shiny green trees undulating over Orlando" target="_blank">Lake County's hilltops is rarer.

Now a valley of rooftops, rather than orange trees, is the view you get from the top of Clermont's Citrus Tower.

That's probably why I find myself collecting things that remind me of the time when citrus was a way of life for many local residents.

I browse eBay and flea markets, collecting brightly colored labels that were once glued to crates of fruit. And recently I went to Groveland, looking for the citrus packing plant where my great grandparents worked some 80 years ago.

I found the Florida Select Citrus plant in downtown, where generations of Groveland residents have labored, first tediously sectioning oranges for canning and later squeezing them for juice. And I found Kathy Burns, who, along with several generations of her family, once worked at the Florida Select Plant, which was called B&W Canning.

Burns, too, holds tight to mementos. She has a group picture from many years ago of B&W workers, dressed all in white and gathered in front of the plant. She can pick out the faces of many relatives in the crowd.

"That was our livelihood," she says.

Burns, 55, mourns the Groveland where she and her husband grew up. Before the freezes, the town was a lively place, with three grocery stores, a mercantile store and a pharmacy with a soda fountain.

Now, it appears the town is making a comeback. After years of stagnation, Groveland is on the brink of becoming one of Orlando's next bedroom communities. Homes, not oranges, will be Groveland's next big industry.

There's talk that the packing plant will be turned into a shopping center with a new grocery store in the next couple of years.

"Most people, like myself and my husband, are not real happy about it," Burns says.

Change is often hard on natives. But even those of us who are Floridian by birth sprang from transplants. Burns' family didn't always live here. Neither did mine.

And the orange trees that once grew thick through Groveland aren't original, either. The plants, which first grew in Southeast Asia, replaced the native pine trees that provided Groveland's first cash crop—turpentine.

Perhaps in homage to all Florida transplants, think about planting a citrus tree in your backyard. After all, there's a good chance one grew there before.

And I'll be grateful for the smell of orange blossoms in January—however faint it may be.

Teresa Burney is managing editor of Orlando Homebuyer.