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A short fiction about returning home through memory.

"Seaboard train number 8 for Ocala, Jacksonville, Washington DC and points north now ready for departure. All aboard!"

Jack heard the announcement of station agent as he sat on the back platform of the parlor car. He had boarded the train after finishing his business down in Miami and was on his way back to his new wife in New York.

But for now, sitting there on the back of the train in Winter Haven, he was almost home.

Jack had grown up just a little east of here, right in the heart of citrus country. He always loved this time of the year. The memories of sitting in the classroom, with the windows open. The temperature during the day was just right for doing that. But it wasn't the comfort he remembered.

It was the smell.

Ah, that sweet, unique smell. So fragrant and so strong, yet so fleeting. It was one of those rare smells that he could actually taste - kind of like how the smell of cinnamon would get his mouth to watering. Of all the smells he had ever smelled, it was by far his favorite.

It was the smell that for a couple of weeks every year would lure Jack and his friends to go home a different way. They'd head out the back of the school so that they could walk home past the orange groves. Nearly every day, they would end playing all afternoon in the grove. Hide and seek, tag - the game didn't matter. It was only an excuse to revel in and enjoy that smell.

For the last three hours, the train had been coming north through the sugarcane and cattle of the interior of southern Florida. Jack had watched the scenery going by with little interest. Scrub pine and cane fields did nothing for him.

As he looked south from the platform, he noticed that a light rain had fallen earlier in the day. As the train slowly began to pull away from the station, Jack knew he was in for a special treat.

The rain had suppressed most all of the normal day to day smells. As the train gathered speed heading towards Auburndale and Ocala, all the Jack could smell on the platform was the acrid scent of the coal the locomotive was burning.

Ten minutes out of Winter Haven, Jack decided to get up from his chair on the platform. He offered the chair to an older gentleman who had just stepped out of the parlor, but that wasn't Jack's real reason for getting up. He walked over to the railing and looked at what was coming.

And there, in the setting sun, were the groves of white flowers.

Moments later, he was enveloped by the sweet smell of the orange blossoms.

All those childhood memories: tag, hide and seek, smelling the blossoms through the open windows, they all came back full force. Memories of going to sleep with the smell of the blossoms and of waking up the next morning with the smell still there. Memories of playing ball in the field next to the grove. Memories of Jim, Frank, Mike - all of his friends. All those memories all came back in a flood of emotion.

The porter came out to the platform to announce that dinner was being served in the dining car. Quickly, everyone on the platform gathered their belongings and retreated to the air conditioning and the dining car. Everyone that is, except Jack.

Jack sat back down in the chair he had surrendered to the old man and let the feelings and emotions of the orange blossoms take him over.

In twenty hours the Orange Blossom Special would have Jack back home in New York.

But for the next two hours as it raced through citrus country, the Orange Blossom Special had already brought Jack home.