Two years ago, as my bitter divorce dragged on and on, I moved out of the high-rise apartment my ex and I had shared and into a small walk-up with our daughter. I felt like a shipwreck survivor—glad to have washed up on dry land, traumatized to be starting over from scratch.
A few days later, a package arrived. I opened it to find a beautiful green stalk sprouting several glossy emerald leaves. It was a lemon tree, a gift from my mother. My first thought: It was the dead of winter in Manhattan—how would I keep this thing alive? But caring for the little tree proved easy; all it needed was water and a warm windowsill.
When it blossomed—white waxy stars with sunshine yellow centers whose sugar and honeysuckle scent my daughter and I gulped in by the lungful—our cramped apartment felt transformed.
The flowers dropped off in early March, leaving in their place tiny green lemons. In the months that followed all but one of those dropped off, too. The lone survivor grew and grew, bending the whole plant under its weight. We harvested our enormous lemon in August. It was sweet enough to eat whole, like an orange, but instead we made a small, delicious batch of lemonade that we drank on our stoop in the late-summer sun, both of us aglow with the singular exhilaration of starting fresh.