Here in the desert southwest of Arizona at the end of winter, a sequence of events begins unfolding that makes the approach of summer a little more palatable. First up, a nearby neighbor who has a grapefruit tree in her backyard but doesn’t like them cleans the tree of as many of these wonderfully sweet treats as she can reach and puts them out on her curb free for the taking. Well, this year we arrived early and without shame took them all. We estimated that we snagged about 70 pounds worth of freshly-picked pink grapefruit.

Immediately, I get to work juicing them with at least two gallons ending up in the freezer and another gallon in the fridge. Hopefully, we’ll get a second squeezing in before any of the fruits starts to turn, though, with hundreds of grapefruits that is a bit of a challenge (a not unwelcome challenge in this case). A large bag of fruit is packed up as a gift to our hosts this weekend and then the remainder are stuffed into every available nook and cranny of our fridge.

The second part of the spring sequence is that the nearby citrus trees are at the cusp of blooming and when they do finally start to burst forth, they scent the air with a fragrance sweeter and more intoxicating than anything we’ve ever smelled before. We often wonder why the perfume of blooming citrus isn’t the most popular scent everywhere. The way is now paved for the arrival of summer and in less than two months, as we start to approach our first 100-degree days, we’ll open our freezer to thaw a quart of pink grapefruit juice, blend it with sparkling water, and revel in the memories of our morning walks when we took in our first breath of a scent that over those days had us thinking that it is perfect to live somewhere that oranges, lemons, and grapefruit grow.