Report From PIA – October 6
Since beginning of my daily Report From PIA, I have kept my eyes, ears and heart open, waiting to find what I should write about. Thankfully, every day something has appeared that said, “Yes! Write about this.” At 6 PM I thought that today might be the exception.
It was a day filled with the good, the usual, the difficult, the unjust, and the ugly. Good was the weather, picking beans, lemon cucumbers, tomatoes and raspberries from the garden. The usual was a couple of consultations (have to pay the bills) and errands. The difficult was an apology. I not only thought someone hadn’t sent me something that she had, indeed, sent, but I wrote a cranky email about it to someone else. A mea culpa had to be written to both. I hate it when I screw up.
Unjust is that a friend of ours, a dear and talented man, has a cruel, degenerative disease. This sucks…to put it plainly. The ugly was my difficulties with editing some video clips… Final Cut Pro kept telling me I had dropped frames and I really don’t think this was the case. Compared to what my friend is dealing with, well, maybe it’s not so ugly after all.
So I wandered the garden at 6 PM, looking for a blog post… a mini vision quest, sans fasting.
Coming up to my lopsided Meyer lemon trees, I found what I was looking for, and no, this isn’t about making lemonade out life’s lemons. Sometimes there just isn’t enough sugar to transform what is sour.
My Meyer Lemon plants are not pretty. Every year they get scale when they’re indoors, in addition to dropping leaves because they’re in reduced sunlight. Purple oxalis seeded into one of the pots when these plants were neighbors one winter, and I can’t seem to get rid of this inadvertent companion plant. But despite all of these imperfections, every year they produce several delicious lemons.
I asked for a whole life, and here it is. Some days are ordinary, and some tragic. Some are filled with our (my) imperfections. A few are a combination of all of these, and much of what happens is out of my control. And yet, even something flawed can bear fruit.
Three pots of Meyer lemons spend the summer on the deck, growing well in the fresh air and sunshine.
These plants drop leaves all winter, and usually are infested with scale, but they produce lemons over a five month period.
