Morning Thanks--two tangerines

It was, a trick question I remember only because it worked. "What's the largest organ in your body?" she asked us.

The heart?

Wrong. The skin.

A room-full of suckers, me among 'em. "The skin. Oh, I suppose that's right. . ."

It's a riddle I remember because right now the skin of a couple of tangerines lays here beside me, their innards sacrificed for an early morning blessing, as they so often are. The peels are already starting to curl, mission accomplished 

Someone, somewhere far away picked the two of them from a tree and sold them and a hundred thousand others to Wal-mart, where I bought a whole netted bag full--"baby bells" or something similar. This morning, only four remained in the basket on the kitchen counter, all starting to look old, which is why, this morning, I chose them and not one of the cold Fujis we keep in the fridge. 

I didn't try to make an art of peeling, freeing the segments in one fell swoop of skin. With tangerines, such accomplishment is not mission impossible, but you do have to work at it. 

Those curling peels grabbed my attention, all that skin a kind of miracle. A long way from home, they've been sitting on the kitchen counter for close to a month. Like an old man's, their thin and discolored peeling still got the job done because inside, trust me, that blessed fruit was as juicy as it might have been had I peeled the two of them three weeks ago. 

That's an old man's joy, I suppose, a way of taking heart. What was inside was pure blessing. This morning, refreshed and renewed by what was once beneath thinning skin of two aging tangerines, I couldn't help remembering an old, soulful essay by Larry Woiwode, "Ode to an Orange," a piece of writing that's something of a revelation. With a North Dakota winter all around, Woiwode remembers the perfect delight an orange brought to the senses.

Each orange, stripped of its protective wrapping, as vivid in your vision as a dimpled sun, encouraged you to think of a pyramid of them in a bowl on your dining room table, as if giving off the warmth that came through the windows from the real winter sun."

Or how about this reverie?

If the oranges had not wended their way northward by Thanksgiving, they would certainly arrive before the Christmas season, stacked first in the depot, filling that musty space where pews sat back to back, with a springtime acidity, as if the room had been filled with a springtime elixer that set it right for yet another year.

To that lyrical homage to an orange, my ode is barely a tangerine, an old one at that.

One story. An ninety-year-old man from Washington once told me his family was so poor during the Depression that one Christmas, all he received from his mom and dad was an orange. 

He held out his hand before me as if to show me that something that precious was forever still there.

This morning I'm thankful for oranges and tangerines, even and maybe especially this little pile of peelings.