the offWhites

I forgot to show you this in the previous post.

Why am I posting a photo of an orange? Let me tell you a little story:

In front of our kindergarten, there are a handful of potted trees. Recently, some of the kids one morning began pointing at one of the trees and shouting “aw-run-jooh!” This is six-year-old-Taiwanese-English-student for ‘orange’.

I looked at the tree and saw nothing orange. “Where?” I asked them. One of my boys came up and pointed to a small, green something, about the size of a shooter marble, dangling from the tree. I then noticed several of them. They were all miniscule and a darker green than a perfect lime. I wondered why immature fruit would be just now growing, since, warm or not, it is winter here. I also wondered what the kids might know about the life cycle of plants, so with great difficulty, after several attempts at restating my question until one of them understood what I was asking (they are mostly six, after all,) I queried “When will the fruit be big and orange and ready to eat?” Eva, a very bright, very sweet, and ridiculously cute little girl,

(only complete face in the picture,) lit up as she realized what I was asking. She excitedly smiled up at me, raised her hand, index finger extended upward in the universal gesture of one about to bestow knowledge upon another (otherwise known as “droppin’ science,”) and answered, “Wait.”What does that have to do with this particular orange? Well, naturally, it’s one of the very same oranges from that tree, now ripe! It fell off the other day. And for an idea of why I picked it up and brought it home, here it is again, in my hand for a size reference: