There is “K,” a teacher of herbal medicine, who helps her students take healing into their own hands instead of giving it away to someone in a white lab coat. In her classes, she guides them in making healing a daily part of life by incorporating medicine into food so that they can nourish themselves and their health.
There is “D,” the “cookingest” guy I know. He tells me he cooks because he likes learning how things are made and likes having everything just right. The way he cooks is often an act of innocent seduction — we friends who share his meals often swoon from both the care he takes and the novelty of his meals. D’s philosophy is that curling toes via the tastebuds is an art of diversity — he never cooks the same thing twice.
“E” works with youth, helping them befriend the rejuvenating magic of plants, a green respite from their concrete existence. She sits across from me separating out dried lemon verbena leaves used in making lemon soap for us.
Dinner commences in an explosion of color. E purrs as she digs into the first course -- a salad of purple cabbage, watermelon daikon, baby herbs, roasted pecans and roasted beets dressed in lemon, rice vinegar, olive oil and lemon honey. K muses about making limoncello as an aperitif -- a simple concoction of lemon, vodka and sugar that, served chilled, makes for an incomparable end to a meal.
We envision the different types of things we could create and grow -- lemon cucumbers, lemon daikons, a lemon-cilantro pesto over whole wheat noodles and an Asian-inspired risotto crowned in a halo of yellow bell-pepper puree. Many of the ingredients pay homage to a winter harvest -- pomegranates, roots and cabbage. The ingredients chosen for our feast mirror the moment, both in time and emotion. This is the bounty of barren times, of warmth and sustenance found under the cover of a momentary snow.
We discuss things as we roll the taste of lemons on our tongue. E remembers the day her stepdad died of lung cancer. Within half an hour of walking through the door to his hospital room, he gasped his last crackly breath, and died. She spoke of a difficult decision: whether to accept the invitation and remain overnight with her stepfamily in her childhood home, even though they did not fully accept her ... or to leave.
She shares with me that the act of making her lemonade meant taking the lemon of the pain of 20 years of living as an “other” that the family feels either sorry or disdain for, mixed with the pain of watching the person who “fathered” her die with no words and only twitchy breaths and grasping limbs, and transforming the years of heavy hurt by making the courageous decision to get back on that plane to return to her true home in San Francisc.
Her courageous decision to be surrounded by her chosen family allowed her to celebrate freedom to its fullest – freedom from the life that her stepfather had passed on from and for the life that she was living. Just hours from the passing of a loved one, fresh from a voyage that lasted longer in her heart than a plane ride, E found the words to a hope she still carries with her to shape her life: that we may always be free to make strong and hasty decisions to honor ourselves, choose our communities and celebrate each passing and each new moment of living life together.
There are many stories like this -- stories of how we transform lemons into lemonade, and how, when we forget to be humbled and honored by the incredible taste of lemons, it can be brought back to our tongues by the love of those around us. In that circle of friendship, we can taste anything -- heartbreak, loss, love and friendship -- all at once, one after the other in an unending chain of stories and the feast of a life well-lived.