slightly revised on 5/3/07

Gramma told a lot of stories. She always had since I was just a little girl. I always wondered if they were true or not. Could these strange experiences she recalled actually be reality? Or just stories she'd once heard -- stories that, in her old age, she mixed up with her past. But I do know that each one of these stories meant something to her, something she wanted me to understand as well. She did live a long ninety six years, so surely she knew what life smelled like. She knew its scent of passion, of love, of joy, of innocence, of insanity, of freedom. She wanted to share these scents with me.


It was on my thirteenth birthday that she told me about the town.

"It smelled of tangerines and deception, mostly," Gramma had said. "But I could only smell the tangerines at the time. The locals told me that the tangerines didn't grow on trees, that they fell from the sunlit sky as if by magic. Their breath had a scent of craze to it, however. It was a scent that was detectable by anyone sane enough to smell it."

At the age of thirteen, I did not fully understand what my grandmother was telling me through this story. I had trouble imagining how the town could smell so strongly of tangerine without any tangerine trees. They had to grow on trees.

"At the time, I was not sane enough to smell the craze on their breaths." Gramma continued. "I was a mixed up girl back then. I was eighteen years old. I smelled newly discovered freedom and passion, but I could not smell lies or craze. I could not smell a warning. I did not want to. When they told me that tangerines fell from the sky, I believed them. They smelled so truthful. They smelled so kind. But this was all just perfume. Tangerine perfume."

I still could not understand this at the time. How could Gramma smell truth? How could she smell kindness? And how did she now know that it was not genuine kindness, but a perfume?

"So what I want you to promise me, my little angel," Gramma held my hands in hers and looked me straight in the eye at this point. "is to do something I didn't realize one could do for a long, long time. Peel the tangerine and taste it. How does it taste? See the faces of the locals. How do they look? Feel their skin. Is it soft? Do not trust your nose."