It’s an era of firsts, and Sunday, I did a couple things I have never done before.
1. I pruned a lemon tree.
2. I climbed the lemon tree in our backyard.
If these seem like trivial feats, let me tell you about our lemon tree: Thorns that seem to be made out of steel stick more than an inch out of the bark. They hurt just to look at. It’s an ornery old tree with gnarled limbs and thick-skinned fruit that Eva Gustavson, the opera star who lived here for more than 50 years, dubbed “stingy.” It’s also our biggest tree, and it’s kind of what the French call “beautiful ugly.” We have never seriously trimmed it in the three years we have owned this property.
So Sunday, I went to town. The tree’s canopy was thick with dead branches that were so dry I could snap them off. Old lemons were rotting on the branch, and some of the leaves had black and white blight. I’m the kind of person that when I start a job, I go deep, so I literally got into that tree. Along with the decay, there were also green shoots and pink and ivory flowers. It smelled delicious. I snapped twigs and clipped branches and knocked moldy fruit down. By the end, my arms were scratched and bleeding and my foot, still recovering from its summer injury, ached.
But the tree looked liberated. No longer crabbed and cranky but open and green and full of light.
No this is not a metaphor. People are not branches. But we live in unprecedented times, and should celebrate noble firsts.
Populism 