“Mom, how do you make lemonade?”
Anyone who knows me, knows that asking me for culinary or libation guidance is a little bit like trying to sell a swimming pool to an Eskimo. But he is earnest and I am caught off guard. Not because I can’t find my way around Google, but because he isn’t the first to mention lemonade this week.
The other came in the lines of an email from a friend I would not have met had it not been for my husband’s unauthorized departure. In an ironic twist that fate inflicts all too easily, we had read about her loss only weeks before and standing in that kitchen I had felt more connected to this woman I did not know than to any other spouse that had been left behind before. They were young and happy, like we were, with their whole lives ahead of them. They had two children, one boy and one girl, of similar ages to our own. He shared the same calling as my husband. Looking at my husband I told him I could not imagine how she felt at that very moment. And then two weeks later, I knew.
From one suddenly left behind to another. Making lemonade, right?
As a child I loved lemonade, a taste that stayed through my teenage years and well into adulthood. Sweet and sour shaken together with a dash of youth and summertime. But lemonade is as individual as the person. It’s not the ingredients that tempt the palate – it’s the art of making lemonade that does.
In the early years of our marriage, we harvested hundreds of lemons from the yard each year. We froze the juice and savored lemon tarts and moist meringues. We soaked sliced lemons in pitchers of crystal water. We made lemonade.
And then I made my own.
“Sweetheart, I’m not exactly sure. But, we’ll learn together.”
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