IN WHICH WE GO TO CALIFORNIA AND BRING A BIT OF IT HOME

We've just returned from a week in California. All of my extended family lives in the San Joaquin Valley, and when Mark discovered that he'd be attending a conference in Los Angeles, he planned a longer trip so we could spend time in the valley. So for the first time since I was two years old, I got to spend Thanksgiving in the land where everything grows.

In the mornings there was frost on the walnut orchards that surround my grandma's house, and we ate breakfast with her in the kitchen, just the three of us. When we'd finished eating we'd usually get out a couple decks of cards and eat tangerines while we played. In the evenings my cousin and her husband would join us, and we'd eat dinner together, play more cards, and work on the enormous puzzle that Grandma had in progress. Mark and I have a longtime friend who recently moved to the valley, and one evening he made dinner for us in his apartment, and we workshopped a game concocted by my cousin, something that combined Monopoly with Risk to form a colossal taking-over-the-world endeavor. These were good times: eating, playing games, eating, and more games. A proper vacation.

And we ate well! You associate Thanksgiving with eating, of course, but this is the central valley we're talking about, and all the good stuff grows there. The tangerines and oranges that grow behind Grandma's house were becoming ripe, and there were persimmons to be picked, and walnuts -- walnuts everywhere. The main event, however, is the tangerines. I associate them with Christmas because it falls right in their prime season. As I was growing up my family visited California every December, ostensibly to celebrate Christmas with everyone out there, but the tangerines are nearly reason enough to make the trip. Thanksgiving falls early in tangerine season, but I was able to eat my way through a couple dozen during our stay.

I was seized with an idea one morning while spitting out seeds. It's too cold back in Iowa to think of planting a tangerine tree in our yard (more's the pity) but why not try growing a few plants inside? I did a little research and learned that it's unlikely for plants grown from seeds to bear fruit, but I may as well try it and hope for the best. The day that the idea struck, I saved the seeds from every tangerine I ate, but the internet told me that the plants would grow better with seeds straight out of fresh fruit, so a few tangerines came home with me intact. While I was at it, I nabbed some lemons from Grandma's tree. They're now part of what I'll call The Great Citrus-Growing Project. 

Most likely is that I'll nurse a small collection of plants that will never provide us with food; at worst none of them will grow for me at all, but at best, we'll start to have a very small-scale version of the San Joaquin Valley's abundance living in Iowa with us. We'll see. It's a nice dream, and if nothing comes of it, we'll just have to go back sometime for a few more rounds of card playing and a few more tangerines.