Canker Sores

When I moved to Florida in 1989, I knew I needed two things in my backyard. Orange trees and a swimming pool. So when I bought my property in 1993, that's what I got. Outside one door, just a few feet from my living room, was a lovely blue swimming pool. Outside the kitchen door were two orange trees, which meant fresh orange juice every morning. Funny thing, I got sick of both the pool and the trees around the same time. I was pretty much over the swimming pool when I looked out the window one day and saw that the shallow end had collapsed into a sink hole. As for the orange trees, they gave the sweetest, most delicious orange juice. Better than Tropicana. I would let the dog out in the morning and grab a couple of oranges while I was out there. By the time the dog wanted back in, I had squeezed and drank my juice. It was like I was living in one of those Florida travel ads. And then one day I stepped out the back door and reached up for one of those big, juicy oranges. Something was wrong. The orange didn't feel right, so I turned it around on the branch and saw a quarter sized hole in the back of it. All of its guts had been eaten out and sucked dry. Over the next few days I found more and more like that. Then one evening, I flipped the porch light on and saw that my beloved orange tree was swarming with rats. Grove rats stealing my juice. Worst of all, they were setting up camp in my attic. I could hear them up there at night, scurrying around and having a grand old time.

At that time there was a problem with citrus in Florida. We had something called citrus canker. Commercial growers were in a panic. Citrus canker didn't kill the trees. It didn't kill the oranges. It didn't harm them at all other than leaving little spots on the orange, and Americans did not want spots on their oranges. So the cure was to cut down and destroy every single citrus tree, in every yard in South Florida. Because my trees were behind a locked six foot fence they could not cut my trees down. But now I had this rat problem and I was not getting any benefit from these trees. So I called the state and told them to come and check them for canker. Sure enough, we had canker and the state destroyed my two orange trees. Not only did they get rid of them for me, they paid me one hundred dollars to replace them with non-citrus trees.

Now it is like ten years later and I had forgotten all about those trees. I live in Chicago now. Orange trees are the farthest thing from my mind along with swimming pools. Well, it seems that some lawyer with nothing better to do, decided that the State of Florida had overstepped its authority in destroying trees on private property, so the lawyer sued and won. Not only that, but the lawyer somehow tracked me down in Chicago and sent me my cut of the lawsuit. $111.57 on a check that was sent to my mom's house in Tinley Park. That's what I call a win-win-win situation.