I'm home today with a sinus infection, which isn't what I really want to write about.  I want to write about the orange I ate with breakfast, which is now a bowl full of tattered peels and spit out seeds.

An orange from the fridge is somewhat unsatisfying.  My teeth hate biting into a cold orange segment. The one I had with breakfast had been sitting out overnight in one of the Thousand Villages bowls I got for Patty as a house warming gift and was room temperature well before I got to it at 10:30.

I brought it upstairs and started to peel it the way I always do: by biting right into the peel.  It's the best way I know of to start eating an orange.  I've always felt my front two teeth look disproportionately large (though this may be an illusion caused by the gap between them which was never corrected by braces), and it's satisfying to get some utility from them. (I also get utility from that gap: it makes a great water gun.)

The peel itself is bitter, which is why you might cringe at the though of biting into an orange peel.  The bitterness of the peel makes the flesh of the orange that much sweeter by comparison.

After the initial bite, which with experience only cuts through the skin and not into the juicy segments, the rest of the peeling is done by hand.  And what happened this time is what I wanted to write about. 

With each tear of the peel, there was a mist or spray or orangeness. Sometimes it would shoot straight out, like salt water from the blowhole of a whale. Other peels created a rolling mist, spiraling and curling, orange motes traveling on tiny air current.

In reality, this probably happens every time with every orange every time it's peeled, but the lighting must have been just right for me to appreciate the details of the spray that simultaneously prompts "Ooh, yum an orange!" from Patty, while obscenely offending Siddhartha, scrunching up his face and chasing him from the room.