sour fruit

I almost bought lemons today, not because I wanted to cook with them, but because they were beautiful.

I know what lemons are because I have eaten them (cut raw with salt and eaten with my Grandmother, juiced and baked, mashed, grated for the peel), I have seen them (photographed, lovingly and mysteriously painted, animated for television, or growing right there on a tree), I have drawn them (with eggs and eggplants and bowling pins and shoes or old rusty hubcaps), I have touched them (fresh and springy, in halves and stinging my - usually - broken cuticles, or mushy and half-green in the compost bin).

The lemons today were not the most beautiful of all the lemons I have encountered, but for just the edge of a moment, when my glance fell upon them, they seemed to cary the essence, the lemon-ness, of all those wonderfully bright yellow grown-things that came before them. Lemons.