God inherits the earth and all who dwell upon it.”68

From east to west and west to east, the orange’s meaning has waxed and waned across time. It has, at once, been a creation of nature and of the laboratory, a symbol of Islam and Christianity, a luxury of European kings and Chinese emperors, an artificial commodity, a holy vessel, a ripe metaphor, a simple fruit.

Each generation thinks they are the first: the first to break away from the past, the first to envision a new way of living, the first to experience the strangeness of moving through this world.

population. In twenty years, the number of Native people murdered in the state, most often by vigilantes who are assisted—and rewarded—by state officials, is estimated to be between nine and sixteen thousand.161 Blood and gold rush forth in California.

Life seemed like a road that I had been plodding along before I had sense enough to look up and take in my surroundings. I was no longer at the beginning now, nor was I at the end. I was in the middle of a plateau and any borders were of my own making. Perhaps there was still enough time to bypass them. Perhaps there was still enough time for the

the author John Steinbeck called these pyres of oranges “a failure … that topples all our success” in his great denouncement of American capitalism, The Grapes of Wrath.

Mythology is born from a desire for belonging.

Grafting has always offered a ripe opportunity for adaptation and survival.

BEHIND US IS THE LIGHT; ahead, a pool of darkness. But let our eyes adjust. There are shades to this void: a true darkness that moves away to leave a corridor of depth. There is an end beyond us, a point that we cannot see. But we should focus on what is closer, what lies between the light and dark. Look carefully now.