Making Lemonade

January 15, 2009

I had lemons today, but I didn’t make lemonade. This is not a metaphor. I have had, in the fridge, lo these many weeks, a mesh bag of maybe a dozen lemons. They were left over from, what? Wassail for Christmas? Wassail for my mother’s birthday? No…oh, I remember. Some knock-‘em-dead booze recipe suggested to me by a sympathetic liquor store attendant, when he heard we would be spending Thanksgiving in a too-small cabin, for too many days, with too many relatives. He thought it would be good anesthesia. Which it was, I guess. Thanksgiving was fine.

But all these lemons. They were packed in the car yesterday, along with the potatoes and onions from under the sink, and my clothes and laptop and all the other stuff that has sustained me in this last month or so in Charlotte, away from Bob and the boats and the eternal mess and the worse-than-camping-ever-was conditions. I should not lump those all together. I enjoy being with Bob. Yesterday I was going back to the boat, and Bob, who has meanwhile been working on the engine and other manly things. It was time for me to start my part of the process of actually getting ready for the trip to Florida. You know, wiping counters and hanging curtains. That sort of thing.

But it’s cold in Florida today. And, not coincidentally, it’s cold in Holden Beach too. The little online weather page I look at says it will be only 17 degrees there tomorrow morning. And with just one tiny heater on each boat (any more than that would blow a fuse), it isn’t going to be much warmer inside either boat than about 40 degrees, at best. Call me wimpy, but that’s too cold for me. So I unloaded the car, partly, and lugged the potatoes and onions and all twelve lemons back up three flights of stairs, along with my laptop and a few other essentials. Then I put the bag of food (too big to fit in the fridge, without taking everything out) out on the balcony for the night (against the wall of the condo, where it wouldn’t freeze). This morning I looked at the bag and thought 1) I better bring it in, and 2) this sure is dumb, schlepping all these lemons around everywhere I go. I know, I’ll make lemonade!

So that’s exactly what I set out to do. I rolled all these stinky little half-dried up lemons on my cutting board, and (lacking a juicer of any kind) squeezed out, by hand, the tablespoon of juice inside the first lemon, together with the nine seeds and the pulp. My hand was hurting by then, so I stopped and took stock. And decided, all saints and positive thinkers and my mother-in-law forgive me, not to make lemonade.

So if you have a good use for eleven oldish lemons, let me know. Otherwise I guess I’ll schlep them down to the boat in a few days, when the weather gets warmer, and Bob and I will drink that knock-em-dead drink together when we finally get the boat cleaned and ready to go. Then I’ll only have ten lemons left….