Lemons are an excellent source of energy, vitamins, and minerals for all living beings. There are several ways to consume them: lemon juice, papelón (unrefined cane sugar) juice with lemon, as a salad dressing, and the zest can be grated to flavor desserts—quite a number of uses.
I've always wanted a lemon tree at home (as we Venezuelans say, a lemon tree). My patio is cement all around, except for the area by the garage, where there's some soil. My husband refused to leave any space in the back so I could fulfill my wish.
Well, I resigned myself to not fulfilling my desire to have a lemon tree in my home. Years passed. I didn't even think about having a lemon tree; we bought lemons, people gave them to us, but we always had lemons at home. One morning, I was cleaning my little patch of land where I planted sugarcane vines of different colors, and they've always been in bloom. When they finish flowering, you have to cut them down; that's been my job to keep them there—yellow, red, pink, orange. Well, I saw a small plant. I thought it might be a lemon, orange, or tangerine because when we had those, the scraps always ended up in the soil where the sugarcane vines were.
I mentioned it to my husband, and he said, "We have to pull it up." I replied, "No, I'm going to ask around to see who wants to plant one at their house, whatever it is." Months passed, and I spent that time saving up some money to go to Colombia to visit our children. Things were tougher then than they are now, but we still managed to stay focused. We saved up and left the country, but the pandemic hit while we were in neighboring Colombia. When we returned and I saw the plant, the first thing I said was, "This plant is staying, whatever fruit it produces. If it's here and has survived all this time without our care, just rain and sun, it must be here for a reason."
It grew, and every season it has given us wonderful, large, juicy lemons. Last year, we even gave away lemons because of the prodigious quantity it produced. Now it's going through what I call autumn; it has lost all its leaves. I thought it was going to dry up, but I've been watching it, and it has little green shoots. The leaves haven't sprouted yet, but my husband says it won't dry up. It's the first time I've seen it like this. However, she still has lemons that she gives us every morning, now just for us because the load has decreased considerably. She had a nest a few days ago, even though she's bare.
If she decides to leave, I'll only be grateful for the time she fulfilled my dream, for the burdens we shared, for the juicy lemons, and because she was always so beautiful.
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