Difficult Fruit

There is a lemon tree in Chelita’s backyard that’s savage. Over time, its branches twisted and turned inward, like the nest of a massive predatory bird. The best lemons hang from the top branches – the eggs. When we try to reach them, we gash our hands and our arms. We bleed. 

We’d always spot three or four of these lemons through the thicket. They’d be heavy like an animal’s heart – and far from us. I’d try to pluck them using a stick with a small hook at one end – I’d poke it as far as it would go, into the top layers of the tree. When I managed to hook a branch that held a lemon, I’d shake the whole thing, hard. The branches would go crazy. Lemons fell all around me.

I brought them to Chelita’s kitchen and spilled them into the sink. These lemons – backyard lemons – are truly ugly. Muddy – as though dug up from the ground and not plucked from a tree. Birds would shoot through the branches, and they’d pat pat pat their dirty feet all over my lemons.  

Every time I return to Ecuador, this is how it goes – the most prized beauties, the best things in life, are terrifically difficult to get to. True jewels are encased in obdurate, difficult skin, and the path to them is always thorny, always full of deep cuts.

In the kitchen, the lemons smelled like the earth outside – like soil, trees, bird feathers. I collected them in a bowl, filled it with water and detergent, and I scrubbed them with a brush, like potatoes. Rinsing constantly, until the water ran clear and the lemons looked like lemons.

The lemons, completely cleaned, still felt bumpy, mountainous.  

I once made backyard lemonade with my sister, instructed by Chelita. Chelita pulled out her ancient blender, and we chopped the scrubbed fruit in half, and then into smaller pieces, with the skin and rinds still attached. When we sliced into the fruit’s meat, a yellow liquid exploded, and the kitchen lit up with its scent. The liquid slid into our cuts, bit us a thousand times.  

Chelita filled the blender with Agua de Guitig seltzer, with its hard, biting fizz. Then sugar – not panela – regular cane sugar, and then the lemons. The lemons went into the blender, rind and all, skin and all.

We hit “ON,” and the lemons and sugar burst in the water. When we pressed “OFF,” the liquid inside looked like ocean froth, and just slightly green. Chelita poured the juice into a fat glass pitcher.

Difficult to describe, this limonada – intensely bubbly, warm from the morning, brilliant like starlight. Those lemons are sun made fruit – not something you’d think you could touch on this Earth.

Sometimes the overripe lemons dropped to the ground on their own, and Chelita would find them. Those she’d clean, cut in half, and rub along her sink and metal countertops. Their pulp shone in pieces. My aunt smoothed the flecks off with a tea towel, and the room smelled sweet, and tangy. Days later, the kitchen still glowed greenly from the work of Chelita’s lemons.