Persnickety Lemon moves from a condo to a house

 

I bought a lemon tree this past spring and set it on my condo balcony where it grew taller and and blossomed. It wasn't thrilled when I brought it inside just before the first frost. I noticed it was beset with white fly, and so sprayed it with sulfur in my condo bathtub. Twice. It protested. 

Then I protested, deciding condo life was not for me for a myriad of reasons. My brother M. didn't seem surprised when I told him. "You need dirt," he said. My daughter C. said that I was one of those people who just need to be "in charge of my shit." Okay. 

So Persnickety Lemon and I moved. Moving is never fun. Moving during a pandemic is fraught with complications.

I stood on the balcony while the movers took everything away. I opened all the windows in the new house while the movers brought the things inside. Persnickety Lemon does not have a parka and was not happy about the open windows on moving day. Or the open windows the day the painters came.

I am not happy that my furniture is way too big for this little 1950s house and that the dining room table fills the whole main room and the only place for a couch is in the basement. But I'm going to make some changes. And Persnickety Lemon is going to get some new leaves.

There are many things to like here.

Like the sunrise in my picture window.

And my utterly charming backyard with its sturdy shed. I can see that red door from my bedroom window, and it looks like a beacon of possibility.

Happy 2021 to you. I wish you good health.

The Mystery of the Wine Thief, Some Wisdom from Ancient Rome, and the Rabbit in the Moon.

The Last Senate of Julius Caesar :: Raffaele Giannetti

The lovely M was in Margaritaville (her presence alone is enough to transform this place from Pillville to Margaritaville) this weekend. She arrived with plans to take me off to the theatre today, so from the moment I awoke, I began working toward our 11:30 departure time so that we could drive back to the L.A. area with plenty of time to make the matinee. One of my first tasks was to take last night's nearly full bottle of wine upstairs (I forgot to do this last night.) But the bottle of wine was gone. This discovery fell into place with the fact that I found my mom roaming around the kitchen and laundry room last night at 1:00 a.m. Aha, I thought, she's swiped the wine and hidden it somewhere in the laundry room. M looked for it. I looked for it. All the while, I wondered if I hadn't put it somewhere for safekeeping downstairs instead of juggling it up the steps with my glass of water, my phone, my book, my laptop. Maybe I tucked away somewhere. But where? All through this self-doubt though, my mom is my prime suspect. But off we go to the theatre.

The play we are going to see is Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar (probably the definitive play on power, politics, and war.) M, with her knowledge of the classics, plays podcasts about Julius Ceasar for us as I drive. We hear about Ceasar's return to Rome after his conquests in Gaul and over the Germanic tribes. So there Ceasar is, riding in his triumphal chariot with a slave standing behind him. It's the slave's job to remind Ceasar to look behind you because the future comes from behind. I insisted we hit the pause button right there. M told me about the Roman god Janus who has two faces, one looking forward, the other back, and we drove in silence for a bit before we went on to finish the podcasts.

M as Julius Ceasar at age 11
We happened to have dug out this photo album because of the visit from relatives last week.

 It was a fabulous production. Completely riveting, our brains swirling with past and present wars and political intrigues.

Then I drove back to attend my Sunday night dance class. I had a hard time focusing at first, but eventually my feet and my brain got together. The dance partner was entirely good humored. He's just happy to dance.

Afterwards when we walked out to the parking lot, the moon was a big yellow disk hanging low in the sky. He asked me if I knew about the rabbit in the moon. I did not. I'm 62 years old and I've never heard about the rabbit in the moon. I have, however, always felt that the future comes from behind. So, I tonight I saw the rabbit in the moon. And my dance partner gave me some beautiful homegrown lemons.

When I arrived back home, I was famished. And I wanted some wine. And there it was. On the dining room table just where we'd left it, untouched.