The Lemon Tree

Photo: Unknown

It seems dreamlike to me now as I look across a sea of intervening years, but as a child, comforted by the warm light that typified California summers, I remember feeling adventure lay around every alley corner and down every tree-lined street. Adventure is still important to me. As a boy though, almost anything was an adventure, even if the adventure was recreated a second or third time around. One of those adventures involved meeting innumerable relatives, grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.

A return visit to my cousin Ida, with my grandmother, meant the best lemonade in the world and lemon meringue pie I have yet to see equaled. These goodies were made from giant fruits that hung from a glossy-leaved tree near Ida’s back fence. The pie was always made beforehand, but lemonade meant a run through the rainbird sprinkler and across a postage-stamp sized lawn, every blade of grass holding a sparkling, jewel-drop of water. At the end of my run waited the lemon tree.

Before picking any of the fruit, I was given strict instruction as to how many and how the best lemons would feel and look like. "They will just fall into your hand," were Ida's instructions, "They will feel very smooth...no dimples! ... And don't get too wet in the sprinkler!" As I picked each fruit, I would smell the brilliant yellow rind and almost float on the scent of lemon oil. That smell lingered on my hands and clothing for what seemed like hours afterward.

When the lemon tree bloomed, the fragrance not only filled the garden, but floated into the little house and added an exotic hint to cookies filled jam, and pão doce, a Portuguese sweetbread usually made at Easter with colored eggs nestled in the top, which cousin Ida always made for visitors. A scent of lemon blossom pervaded it all. My cousin said the lemon tree and its fruit are a parallel of life, an apposite. Life being a thing to explore and enjoy, all of the bitterness, all of the sweetness. There will never be a guarantee: you must taste and you must explore to know the truth. That is the promise of the lemon tree; to know, you must taste. Cousin Ida seemed to know about life and she certainly knew about lemons and the lemon tree.

Ida was my grandmother’s age, maybe older, and when my grandmother and I would arrive she always asked, “Who’s your little friend, Maddie?” and without waiting for a reply, she would ask me, “Que é seu nome, menino?” What’s your name? She knew my name; she probably just wanted to be sure it was the right one. After reminding her for the millionth time, she would usher grandmother and I into her living room where an old, old upright grand piano filled one wall. On top of it were tiny porcelain animals, collected over the years; one was a figurine of Saint Joseph only three inches tall. Cousin Ida also collected glass hats, a habit she shared with my grandmother, and more than dozen in different colors lined some small shelves above her old fashioned sofa.

In a white wire cage there was a canary, a male that would hop wildly from a swinging perch to the bars and back, all in an instant. Occasionally he would burst into song filling the house with a silver trill and causing Ida and my grandmother to break into laughter. Ida had silver white hair, but she used to flit around like the canary, a dynamo. Ida seemed to be able to produce almost anything at a moments notice. My grandmother dyed her hair black and looked so young, people would ask if I were her son, a real live wire, my grandfather used to say. Ida was an even more electric personality. She was an indefatigable shopper who encouraged anyone to “buy it if you want it, it’s just money. Live dangerously!” My grandmother would exclaim, “I don’t know where she gets all that energy!”

After pulling my grandmother around the room to show her some newly acquired possession, Ida and grandma would perch in chintz-covered armchairs and ‘discuss’ family, with my grandfather always being the first target. Then other cousins, unnamed and uncountable, and in-laws would be examined under their verbal microscope; one female cousin usually bearing the brunt of their contempt; “if I acted like that I’d kill myself”; “that woman is impossible”; “what would her mother (a much loved Auntie Erminha) say if she were alive today?” They would pat each other on the arm and reminisce about my great-grandmother’s philosophies of life; “if your bed is made and your dishes are done, your house is clean.” Through it all I was expected to just sit quietly and respectfully, especially respectfully.

I sat on the sofa. It was an overstuffed affair, covered in a rough but slippery material that poked me through my trousers and would not let me sit still, and even when I tried the slipperiness of the fabric sent me sliding unwillingly toward a colorful rug. I don’t think I was really expected to listen, but I knew the time would come when the language would slowly shift into the musical tones and abrupt accents of Azorean Portuguese. I thought it was the most beautiful language in the world.

Its words used to send me on strange flights of fancy, mentally flying over the nine green islands and beyond to Lisboa where they sang the fado that old Auntie Erminha used to sing so quietly as she sat. Finally, even that, and watching the canary would begin to pall and I would ask if there were any lemons on the tree.