Heaven is in the air

You can smell it all around you.  Just walk outside and catch the sweet heady smell of orange blossoms.  I want to sleep outside.  It's amazing how the smell of something can bring up memories long put away.  I remember dates I went on with Richard in high school and how sweet the air smelled.  Going to the easter pageant and enjoying the soft spring night.  I can still remember closing on our house in Redlands in March.  One night as we were moving in there I wanted to kneel down and kiss the driveway because it smelled like my home in Mesa.  Redlands is orange grove country too and I enjoyed living there because it was more like Mesa.  My Grandpa Schnepf planted oranges trees in Mesa, long, long ago.  It was somewhere around Alma School Road and maybe Main or University I think. My mom lived “in the groves” when she was a child and remembered the wash house he built my gramma so she had a place for her wringer washer and clotheslines. People thought he was crazy, but the trees grew and along with other crazy men made Mesa home to many orange groves.  Not so many now, but there are still enough to perfume the air and provide citrus at Christmas and through Feb. and Mar.  I love this time of year.