Lemon Seeds

This story begins six years ago, when my house is filled with children under the age of eight and making lemonade from scratch feels brave. It begins on a sticky kitchen counter, in the trenches of picky eating and tantrums and sleeplessness and a pandemic that just won't end.

I am not thrilled about refereeing fights about who gets to squeeze more lemon halves or about trying to keep the three year old from dumping our measuring cup of lemon juice onto the floor. But since I decided it would be fun when I added lemons to my grocery cart last week, here we are: covered in sour juice, sneaking pinches of sugar, lifting the three year old down off the dining table a dozen times, and fighting over who gets to squeeze more lemon halves.

If you ask my kids, it's fun, especially for the child picking out the slippery seeds and stuffing them into her clenched fist with a guilty glance around the kitchen that I almost miss.

You know you’re not keeping those, right?

It's almost out of my mouth before I manage a questions that's a little more gentle: “What are your plans for those?”

Of course, she wants to plant them.

Lemon trees don’t grow in Canada.

Those belong in the green bin.

You know they probably won’t sprout.

It’s going to be really hard to keep them alive.

I don’t want a pot of dirt upstairs. (I will do almost anything to avoid a pot of soil in the carpeted playroom, in fact.)

These thoughts flash through my mind, but instead of protesting, I disappear into the garage in search of a pot and a bag of potting soil. For reasons perhaps only a homeschooling parent can fully understand, I decide to let her try this.

We spread a garbage bag onto the table where we were doing math worksheets just a few weeks before, tip the soil into the pot, poke half a dozen lemon seeds into holes we make with our fingers, and water them.

(I should clarify that while I go along with this project today, squelched dreams in this summer of lemon seeds include oatmeal trails through the house, homemade parachute jumps off our garage roof, bike races in the middle of our neighbourhood walking path evening rush hour, puddle jumping in the kitchen, and sending the three year old down the stairs in a suitcase.)

The weeks pass. My daughter checks the pot daily, adding water when it's dry and moving it around her room so that it catches all the best sunlight, but nothing is growing. I am ready to wrap up the experiment and google “How long do lemon seeds take to germinate?” so that I have some justification for (finally) dumping the pot, we find seedlings poking out of the soil.

I am thrilled in a way I was not expecting, both for the confidence that my daughter grew along with the roots of those tiny trees and for the fact that I didn't stop her.

Because what I couldn't have known then is that the story didn't end on the afternoon we made lemonade or even on the afternoon we noticed the leaves. Instead, it continues six years later, with a teenager--who has learned many things both because of and in spite of me--and a six foot tall lemon tree in her bedroom.

I just had to step back and be ok with a little dirt.