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