When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint Them or Make Lemon Cake

"Still Life with Lemons and a Bee" by Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670), Italian painter of the Baroque period. 

(Retrieved from @womensart1 #womensart on Facebook)

Dear Reader,

I saw this painting on a friend's page on Facebook. It immediately became one of my favorite paintings and I would like to have a print of this for my Tuscan Italian kitchen. I never regarded lemons as something too sour, or as a metaphor for the sour things in life. From my childhood, I remember homemade lemonade, eating lemons with sugar on them, lemon cake and cookies, and lemon meringue pie. I have always loved lemon and pepper chicken, chicken piccata, and lemon juice on my salad with olive oil and salt. I love the fresh scent of lemons in the air. The bright yellow color of the lemon reminds me of the sun. It is an interesting case of opposites when something so sour comes from sweet lemon blossoms. The bee in this painting of course reminds me of honey, another of nature's gifts that is yellow, golden like the sun. To me, lemons signify happiness and joy of being in the sunshine. 

I mentioned in my blog description and in my introduction that in this blog I wander and meander through the arts and the world of artful living. This is what I am doing here by letting my mind wander through this painting and the image of lemons. Merriam Webster's online dictionary gives the following definitions for meander:

Definition of meander

 (Entry 1 of 2)

1 

 

                   : A winding path or course

                  especially : LABYRINTH

2: a turn or winding of a streamThe meander eventually became isolated from the main stream.

           meander  verb

meandered; meandering\ mē-​ˈan-​d(ə-​)riŋ  \

Definition of meander (Entry 2 of 2)

intransitive verb

1: to follow a winding or intricate courseacross the ceiling meandered a long crack— John Galsworthy

2: to wander aimlessly or casually without urgent destination : RAMBLEhe meandered with the sightseers gawping at the boat people— John le Carré

(retrieved from, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meander)

 As a writer, I spend a good deal of my time free-associating one thought to the next; this sometimes shows in my writing and in my conversation with others. I have always been a wanderer and a meanderer--including through the woods around my house, all my life. Often  in this blog I will include my memoirs too, and I am writing this blog for my daughter and granddaughter among my readers. 
Truly,Mary Ann

An Introduction to my Blog

 Dear Reader,

In this blog, I will wander and meander through the beauty in the world there is to enjoy in the arts and entertainment: Literature, visual art, music, dance, film, TV and other media, and also musings through artful everyday life. Its title indulges my memories and stories from my "lived experience" and also some old daydreams of mine, which I write about below. This is my first post in this blog, my introduction to it. Welcome!

On Mother's Day last year (2019), my daughter and granddaughter gave me a little lemon tree in a small pot which they had grown from seed. It was the perfect gift and perfect timing. It brought me tiny tears of joy. I then told my daughter and granddaughter the following story, below, which describes why the little lemon tree was the perfect surprise for me that year.

When I was a young writer, in a creative writing program in college, I worked at the perfume counter in a department store. Perfume and flower farm companies would send brochures and booklets which were breathtaking show-and-tells of the perfume industry from around the world, and I also loved discovering 'secret' ingredients in various fragrances and colognes. I used to daydream about having a flower farm and an orchard of fruit trees and grapevines by the Mediterranean Sea, where I would sit and write under the trees. I had always loved my grandmother's garden with her apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees, and her cobblestone patio with its grapevine 'ceiling.' I used to sit in the grapevine shade with the bits of sunshine dancing and sparkling through it, or sit under the trees in her backyard that encircled her and my grandfather's large vegetable garden. There was an expansiveness to it yet it gave me a cozy tucked in feeling. It felt like a storybook setting.

Then, at some point in time, I began writing a novel for a class, and after reading the first chapter of my manuscript, my professor suggested I read The Asiatics by Frederick Prockosch. The main character in the book travels through Asia, narrating his travels, telling of his sensory experiences in an exotic, foreign land, and what I most loved about it were scenes with the lemon and the peppercorn trees. He thought the novel I was writing had a quality to it that was similar to that of Prockosch (and remarked that it would make a good screenplay). I hold that memory of that remark dearly, when my earlier life as a writer was so full of hopes and dreams; back then, it seemed I had all the time in the world to finish the novel and possibly others in my lifetime. Though I would tinker with the novel now and then, pulling it out of its drawer every few years or so, it always got put back into the drawer, back on the back burner. I always felt too busy and never made the time.

And so it turned out that my precious daughter and granddaughter brought me the little lemon tree at precisely the time I decided to return to my novel writing, and the little lemon tree, like a good luck charm, is the perfect symbolic gift for that. It gave me a little chunk of the world I had always imagined in my daydreams into my real everyday world here and now. Perhaps my life still holds some surprises, perhaps I can still make some dreams come true.

Now I can write with the little lemon tree beside me. If it grows big enough some day, perhaps I will actually be able to sit under it as I write. And perhaps, make lemonade and lemon cookies to share with my daughter and granddaughter, to share more of the spice of life.

Truly,
Mary Ann

mbenci.writes@gmail.com