In “Oranges,” Gary Soto celebrates the love and affection that a twelve-year-old boy had for his daughter during the winter season. The first line of the poem makes it clear that the boy was only twelve years old when he was first able to walk down the street with a girl. The poem illustrates the nervousness he displayed as they walked down the street "cold and weighed down by two oranges in my jacket" and shows how nervous the boy was. Because being nervous would cause you to notice everything that is happening around you and notice even the smallest things. As a typical twelve year old boy, he didn't know what to expect on his first date with his daughter. Oranges are his burning love, his desire, hence the “fire in my hands” or “the porch…yellow”. The orange in his jacket symbolized the loving and radiant relationship between the boy and the girl, as the orange could have attracted a lot of attention "which was so bright against...that, from a distance/someone might have thought that I made a fire. in my hands.” Even though it's winter and everything around them is cold and dull, the love between these teenagers is still able to shine in the dark. The “Orange” is a symbol of great happiness and being able to describe where the girl lives, it is obvious that they have known each other for some time. When the boy and girl were walking down the street and entered a pharmacy, she picked up a candy bar but the boy only had a token with him even though the candy bar cost 10 cents. This situation shows that this period was a time when candy bars cost 10 cents and a time when a merchant accepted an orange from a young boy to pay in full for what he had brought because the boy did not have the full of payment. ..... middle of paper ...... grandmother's corpse and nephew went from everyone's "favorite tune" to an anthem appropriate to the situation. There are, however, two phases in their action; in western culture, the family's behavior towards the corpse is at first a non-provocative attitude as they were supposed to be sober and depressed, but instead they ignored and forget the fact that the grandmother is dead, which could be because they never liked her, as our narrator says in the last line "Grandmother, dead, whom I never loved." The second phase is African culture; in Africa, when an elderly person dies in a family, it is seen as a source of celebration and a place where people rejoice and dine together. So, from the African perspective, the family's attitude was completely correct in the beginning and they could have dined and won all day.