Lemon

It's been said that when Life hands you lemons you make lemonade. 

I prefer to make a blog posting.

The behemoth you see above was picked from one of our two lemon trees. We have a Mayer tree that produces juicy, perfectly formed lemons that we use for everything from salmon to my wife's delicious lemon bars.

And then we have lemons from the ugly tree. I don't know what species it is. I often joke that it came from another planet as it yields lemons of an odd and sometimes extraterrestrial appearance.

If I were still pursuing my career as an amateur painter, I'd be tempted to commit these mutants to acrylic paint. But I'm not, so I won't. But despite their many tentacles and ghastly appearance these lemons were no bigger than average, about the size of a baseball.

The Big One, which I have dubbed Le Monster is the Saturn to these minuscule Plutos. It dwarfs my oversized coffee cup, which was given to me by my daughters for Father's Day in light of my unhealthy overconsumption of Joe.

How big is Le Monster? I'm glad you asked.

I got out the tape measure and took its vitals. It's 9.5 inches in height, 5.75 inches in width, and a whopping 17 inches in circumference. You have a grapefruit that can compete with that? Bring it on.

I don't have a scale that measure its weight, but I'm guessing it tips the scales at 5 or more lbs.

Le Monster has been sitting on our kitchen counter for more than a week now. Mostly because we don't know what to do with it. The juice inside of it will be worthless as most of the previous oversized lemons we've picked in the past. And we don't want to just toss it as it feels like we'd be disposing of some kind of art. Or at the very least an incredible conversation starter, you know when we are finally at a stage to have friends and family come over.

I'm well aware of its giggle value. 

Earlier this week, we indulged ourselves with a cleaning crew to make our house presentable after a year's worth of Covid hibernation. In between picking up dust bunnies the size of a bunny and chipping away at the gunk inside our eternity-built Wolf Range, I could hear the two Hispanic cleaning ladies gawking and jabbering about Le Monster.

"Pinche cavron, este es un lemon muy grande."

"Muy grande, verdad."

"Donde esta la biblioteca?"

OK, they didn't ask, where is the library, but my Spanish is not what it used to be.

Still, despite running down all the vital statistics, I'm not sure I've done justice to Le Monster and accurately conveyed its mammothosity. 

But since a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case a thousand tiny cups of lemonade, I will leave you with this last reference shot, which many would claim is in an improvement for my current visage.