"Zacchaeus and the Orange Tree"

Dana and Andrew, with their three children, have recently moved back to Winnipeg from Mexico, where they lived for four years.  One of the great benefits of spending time with them, along with playing Scrabble, traveling to old colonial cities, just hanging out and telling stories to and singing songs with Eva and Micah - Joshie came along later- was enjoying the oranges and lemons from the three citrus trees in their back yard.

Here Dana, in the shade of the orange tree,  is holding  Micah- 3 months old at the time- while 2 year old Eva is sweeping the patio. 

The tree was loaded with juicy tangerine-type oranges.  Over the three week period that we were there we had pretty well stripped the tree of its juicy fruit.  Eva enjoyed them as much as we did.

One of the songs we'd been singing over and over again was:

"Zacchaeus was a wee little man, 

a wee little man was he,

he climbed up in a sycamore tree, 

for the Lord he wanted to see."

 Every time we came to verse two:  

"And as the Saviour passed that way, 

He looked up in the tree,"

 we would convincingly speak the next line:

"Zacchaeus, you come down..."

 and so it went.

As we were nearing the end of our stay we were scrounging around for the last of those precious oranges.  I was convinced there must be a few more hiding somewhere within those thick, somewhat thorny branches.  I urged Al to go around the back and see if he couldn't snag a few more oranges for us, by carefully getting into the center of the tree.  After he'd been attempting this for a few minutes and most of Grandpa was not visible to little Eva, she got a bit concerned and walked over to the tree, shook her little finger in the air and out of the blue convincingly repeated:

"Zacchaeus, you come down!" 

And he did...wearing a great big grin and bearing precious fruit!

But while the tangerine orange tree was bare the "juice orange tree" was just coming into its own and we enjoyed freshly squeezed orange juice at breakfast.