Grapefruits and Oranges

As winter nears, I think about the changing season and how often the foods we eat shift along with the season change. Not sure why this popped into my mind, but I have these memories of my childhood when Mum would serve us all an appetizer for dinner, which was either grapefruits or oranges, sliced in half for digging our spoons into. Living in Florida, we tend to have a lot of citrus fruit available year round. I think we take that for granted, as most northern places do not have such easy access to citrus, at least not growing outside in their neighborhoods.

I feel like so many family dinners would begin with a bowl, a spoon, and a sliced in half grapefruit or orange. But why would Mum serve us fruit as an appetizer? Kind of odd, right?

Because Dad, in all his skills as being the most thrifty man with four children (I am only now beginning to see the breadth and depth of the ways in which he was super thrifty) would collect grapefruits and oranges from yards. Dad had a lawn maintenance business, and he gathered fruit from various trees from the yards he would be mowing that day. He gathered the just fallen fruit and low hanging fruit that was in the way, so as not to take all the prime fruit. He would bring bags of fruit home and feed his family a wholesome appetizer.

All my childhood, I thought it was the most normal thing in the world for Dad to bring home grapefruit and oranges after his mowing that day. He asked permission from the owners, of course, and probably said something about his four children, and the owners let him.

For some reason, I always thought it was rather elegant to have a first course at dinner. A fruit course can be however fancy you would like it to be in your imagination, even if you are eating from Styrofoam bowls. But in my young mind, it felt elegant, as we all sat down at the round wooden kitchen table scooping our grapefruits.Sometimes we could even add some sugar on top.

There is something so memorable in that simple thing. It is another source of appreciation for Dad thinking of his family whilst mowing lawns. As he worked on yards he saw trees full of fruit, many dropped onto the perfectly cut grass, and he thought - my family could eat all this citrus fruit and the old owner certainly cannot eat all these. Let's get some vitamins into the kids.
He would collect the fruit. Mum would prepare.
Smart Dad, he was.

And once the elegance of a first course was complete, we would move onto the main course, likely some meat, veg, starch combination. Not quite as elegant, to me, as the first course.