#FOTD: Lemon blossoms in our Tucson backyard

My mother always cooked with lemons. We had a lemon tree in our backyard when I was growing up in Northern California, and it produced lemons by the bushel basket. She even left a huge bag of lemons on the front seat of my car when I was in college, so my dorm-mates and I could make fresh lemonade. That activity was a wholesome departure from our usual shenanigans.

The house we bought here in Tucson came with a sad, neglected lemon tree. We’ve been pampering it since we moved in–giving it lots of water, mulching it with compost, and, in my case, whispering sweet nothings to it as though it were a long-lost lover.

For months, it didn’t seem to do anything but sit there, looking pitiful. No new growth. No buds. Nada. My sweet nothings turned into pleas. “Won’t you bloom? Pretty please? Just a few little flowers?”

Nope.

Then, being the stable, emotionally healthy human that I am, I progressed to threats. “Bloom, or I’ll hire a tree service to cut you down, and I’ll replace you with a young, voluptuous, fruitful Meyer Improved.”

I know you’ll be shocked to learn that that didn’t work, either.

And then one day, a few weeks ago, I paid the object of my obsessive, unrequited passion a visit. And there it was: a bud. No, wait. Two buds. Do I hear three?

And now, my friends, our sad, obstinate lemon tree is burgeoning with buds from its trunk to the tips of its frost-burned tops, and our backyard is suffused with the perfume of lemon blossoms. I can walk outside and imagine I’m sitting on the veranda of a fancy resort in Southern California–until I trip over the cinder blocks from our current yard project and step in dog poop.

Oh, well. At least we’ll have lemons.