On Grapefruits & Lemon Trees

I had a delicious grapefruit half this morning. Pink and delicious. It brought back a flood of loosely related memories. Graham asked for a bite, and when I gave it to him, he chewed it and swallowed it, but said, "I don't like it."

When I was a lonely freshman in college eating in the Helaman Halls cafeteria (the Cannon Center, which some affectionately called the Cancer Center), I remember one lonely morning eating a humble-looking grapefruit half (instead of my usual sugar cereal) that made my day, and rocked my world. I even wrote a poem about it for my Rhetoric & Civilization class, patterned after "A Road Not Taken." If I weren't so cozy in my bed right now, overhearing the boys talking themselves to sleep, I'd go downstairs and dig it up. But it was a sort of coming-of-age poem about how as a grownup now I eat my grapefruit without sugar, and relish the deliciously complicated sour and sweet together.

Eating that grapefruit this morning reminded me of our grapefruit tree in our front yard at D-1075 New Friends Colony, New Delhi, India. It was giant, and after the mali (gardener) spent a year digging our kitchen scraps into the earth around it, it burst out in magnificent blooms that later turned into eighty-odd grapefruits. Delicious grapefruits that we shared with our Pulsipher cousins who came to live with us. Nearly all eight Pulsiphers relished grapefruit, eating it every morning for weeks. I didn't have to open a roadside stand after all!

The memory of those yummy grapefruit blossoms reminds me of the fragrant blooming lemon tree in my entryway. In February 2003, when we lost our little Samuel to exencephaly, Dad sent us a potted lemon tree in bloom. One year I left it out in the cold, and half of it died, but half of it lived. It's become a symbol of the sweetness that lives on after the searing sadness of Samuel's death.

We left that lemon tree with my mother-in-law Claudia while we were in India, and she repotted it, fertilized it, and loved it. Since I have repossessed it, I'm afraid it hasn't enjoyed such loving care. Last year in December it started to blossom about the same time Claudia started slipping from the earth after a long fight with breast cancer. When we visited her the last time, I brought her cuttings of the buds about to burst forth. But they never did.

This year the tree only started to blossom about a week ago, after Grandpa Key's death, after a sort of depressing Christmas, after we'd brought it inside and I remembered (finally) to water it. Now the fragrant blooms fill the room with that lovely smell that Peter, Paul & Mary sang about:

Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flow'r is sweet,

But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

That lemon tree brings me to the book I'm reading since Amazon brought it to my door a few days ago. An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken. She paints a vivid picture of what it feels like to lose a child you never met (hers was stillborn). At one point, she mourns the loss of the happiness of her pregnancy with that child. Because of the tragedy that marked his birth and death, everything else in his history before and after that automatically becomes sad, when in reality she was blissfully (perhaps ignorantly) happy throughout her pregnancy, completely unaware that anything could go wrong, and that she couldn't control all the paths of her future.

While it's a shame to lose the glitter of those happy memories, at the same time, the bitter interim after the loss (for me, Samuel) creates a glittering foil for the even happier future to come (for me, delighting in Isaac, Russell and Graham a little more because I realize how quickly they could become not-mine).

You must taste the bitter to know the sweet.