It’s the day after my friend’s wedding, and I’m having my own version of wedding glow. No, I didn’t get married yesterday. No, I didn’t even have sex yesterday. But I had so much fun over the last two days that now I am sad to be leaving sunny Phoenix and my friend’s great friends, warm and hospitable family, and the endless citrus trees that line the streets and homes everywhere in this great metropolis. And I should also mention I’m going back to New York, where a snow storm is on its way this Tuesday. Fun times await.

That’s the other thing about the Phoenix area — these freaking citrus trees are everywhere. In car rides from the airport to downtown, from downtown to Scottsdale and through the residential areas of Phoenix, all I saw were these gorgeous, luscious trees dotted with yellow and orange. FRESH FRUIT TREES. In New York City, I am so enveloped in a concrete jungle that I rarely think about how people living in other parts of the country and world just get inundated with fresh fruit and vegetables on their own property without even trying. As my friend’s grandpa told me, when many people move into their homes in Arizona, their houses come with fresh lemon and orange trees because much of this land was once citrus orchards (the irony considering we are in the middle of a desert out here). And these trees tend to flower and fruit with little to no effort outside of watering; he says in a typical year, his citrus trees are overloaded with fruit from January all the way to nearly September! They try to juice as many of the oranges as possible and freeze the juice for daily consumption, but with just the two of them, they just cannot keep up. They even give them to visiting friends and family, but even after all that, they end up wasting about 70 percent of the fruit. “The trees just don’t stop producing, and we can’t eat and drink them all!”

Well, I would love to have taken home a bag full of fresh, organic citrus if they would offer to give some to me…

The freshest fruit we get is from Fairway or Whole Foods. What a different life. Her dad was so amused at how excited I got about the fresh citrus. Clearly, I’m coming from a very urban area. Now, I can’t even look at the oranges and lemons at the grocery store the same way. This is probably how they feel about bottled orange juice or lemons at the supermarket — not up to their standard of freshness.