Oranges

Acabei de encontrar um trabalho para Inglês do ano passado. Se bem me recordo, na minha preguiça tentei usar a desculpa habitual de que não sabia sobre o que raio haveria de escrever. O professor disse para falar, por exemplo, sobre laranjas. E assim o fiz. Não me lembro ao certo do objectivo do assignment, mas creio que era para falar sobre algo do passado. Foi isto que saiu (ainda com os erros):

Oranges
Isn’t it interesting how even one of the most common fruit can have more meaning to you than a big car or a house by the beach? The orange, occasionally a perfectly round-shaped fruit, orange it’s colour like it’s name, and with a very distinct smell and taste. A smell that gets trapped under your fingernails to haunt you the rest of your day, and a taste that sometimes is nothing but entirely sweet, although it usually has a sour sweetness that no other fruit can mimic. And if properly squished, a tasteful and healthy juice comes out.
When I was really young, my backyard used to be completely filled with orange trees. It was row after row of trees, and almost every tree had a different breed of orange. I used to play around those trees all day long, since as a child, free time was common. That backyard was my playground, and the trees had almost endless possibilities to be explored. I would climb them, hang on the bigger branches like a little monkey or even try to make swings on those branches with pieces of rope I would find lying around. Other more indirect uses I had for them were as football goalposts or as obstacles in an imaginary course when I was riding my bicycle.
With time, everything changes, and that backyard as I used to know it, unfortunately, wasn’t an exception. I grew older and so did my parents. They also grew tired of taking care of almost a dozen trees, so they cut them up and removed their roots from the underground. An interesting process involving heavy machinery and a lot of loose dirt. Who would’ve thought that an excavator was needed to dig out the trees that filled my childhood with joy? It’s kind of poetic and almost sad.
Up until then, I didn’t like the taste of regular oranges. I preferred the taste of the tangerine, which is almost like the sweeter sibling (or son) of the regular orange. I started to appreciate the richness of the taste of the orange almost at the same time as I started to appreciate and be grateful of all the things my parents had sacrificed and worked out just to give me the best life they could. By that time I also started to take more into account the few, but really good, lessons my father had to teach me. Those lessons were so small in number because my father worked, and still does, for an international company that builds power stations, oil refineries and other big metal structures/buildings. As a result of that, he spent month after month in foreign countries and became a sort-of absent father.
As absent as he might’ve been, when he was present, he tried, as much as my stubbornness allowed, to teach me good manners, discipline and morals. And even if I can’t recall every wise thing that he said to me, all those things that he taught me are reflected in the caring, respectful (to others) and understanding person that I am today. Sometimes my values might strike as old-fashioned, but I am nonetheless a person that tries to help whoever is in need (even if unknown), a person that knows how to act in the right situations and hopefully I’ll be able to pass that down to someone in the future.
Isn’t it interesting how even one of the most common fruit can represent almost half of your life? How one single bite in a piece of fruit can make you remember the times you fell from an orange tree, or just the conversations that you had with you father while eating oranges? Isn’t it interesting how something that probably has no meaning to someone else, can mean the world to you?