Rawlings's Life: Oranges

One cannot talk of Florida without envisioning fields of orange groves. Oranges have become a huge part of Florida's industry as well as apart of its identity. In Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, orange groves become more than just citrus. Rawlings captures the magic and alluring beauty the orange groves exude. The groves are not just citrus but awe-inspiring nature that enthralls her and transports her soul to another world.

Rawlings claims in the first chapter: " We at Cross Creek need and have found only very simple things. We must need flowering and fruiting trees, for all of us have citrus groves of one size or another" (11). Indeed, it is the simple things that make a person truly happy. Thus, it is not hard to see that Rawlings was not just in love with the town, but the very land itself. For anyone who has physically walked through an orange grove, it's easy to understand why Rawlings states, that in doing so, one is "out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another" (15). For Rawlings, a simple pleasure is simply being shrouded in the shade of her orange trees. She becomes almost like a little girl again, exploring her backyard woods for the first time. The "enchantment" that she finds makes her more down to earth. She is in her own world in those groves, away from time and space. She can delight in the power of nature to take something simple and make it utterly beautiful.

Other than being just beautiful to look at, the orange groves attach themselves deep in Rawlings's soul. They function as a way back to the essence of her childhood. No matter how creative Rawlings is, her imagination (or anyone else's for that matter) is not as vivid as it had been when she was a child. For her, the orange groves bring back to life what automatically dies upon entering adulthood:

It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice and Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again. (16)

Besides being reminiscent of childhood, the orange groves are visually calming to Rawlings. They are pure nature and nothing less. Many families in Cross Creek grow oranges for profit. At the time that Rawlings was living at Cross Creek, her money affairs were better off than most, which is probably what enables her to admire her grove without worrying too much about financial consequences. She can bathe in her grove's beauty, while, at the same time, detachedly watch the oranges freeze in the winter:

The oranges hang like lighted lanterns through the winter. I use the excuse of waiting for a better market, but I delay in fact only because I cannot bear to see them cut and the globes of light extinguished. Several times I lost the entire crop in a freeze through my dilatory fondness. (335)

Orange groves in Cross Creek capture and deepen the richness that is Marjorie Rawlings's spirit. They are mythical and magical wonders of nature that inspire her imagination. Rawlings has forever captured the beauty that once was Florida in her book. Her orange groves survive because of her legacy. They were not lost to highways, malls, and housing developments. Of all the things Rawlings achieved in her lifetime, one of the most important was preserving the awesome power that is Mother Nature.

--Kristin Gosline

Works Cited

• Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. Cross Creek. New York: Touchstone, 1996.