Lemon is Important to the Flavor

I consider myself blessed that I am teachable. In fact ideas that are incredibly, profoundly useful come from all sorts of unexpected places. 2008 was filled with these delicious nuggets of wisdom. By far, my favorite is this. "Be sure to use the lemon -it's important to the flavor".

Sometimes it takes a while for these things to sink in. The lemon instruction was one of those that had to slowly make it's way through my consciousness. This gem came to me back in September.

September, 2008 was an amazing month. Insanely difficult in a good way. This story actually starts in July of 2008 when Jim and I made the decision to purchase this little house. I had this wonderful picture in my head of what it would be like when we "Hamletized" it: we were not purchasing a split level fixer-upper, we were actually deciding to live in the cutest cottage you've ever seen - you'd be dying to knock on the door because just knew the whole place would smell of cookies and you'd just feel happy and sunny the minute you entered it.

The before and after of our little house is a story for another day. Sufficed to say for this post is that we planned on two weeks of work, then we'd have the house of our dreams... The 'actual' exceeded the "budgeted" by four weeks and a whole lot of life in between. So on the 1st of September, Jim and I moved into my parents house instead of the cozy cottage we'd planned on.

We had a nice weekend picking out paint colors and carpet and appliances... FUN! Except that my whole cookie cottage reeked - not of vanilla and sun-dried tee shirts, but of cat pee and motor oil. So sad. We went to work (our day jobs), then came home to stinkyville and flat out hideous manual labor for several hours. Then we did the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the next day. I was just sure that somehow I'd woken up in a nightmare and that the rest of my life was just going to be work for 15 hours a day with no end in sight.

But this is a blog about miracles and sure enough there were plenty during the Fall of Work. One was that after every long stinky day, Jim and I came back to a yummy home cooked meal every night. EVERY night. Attempt number six on "pee remediation" took place after about three weeks at my parents. It was a particularly demoralizing evening of sanding the floors, which, by the way, didn't work at all to remove the smell, but worked quite well in spraying microscopic pee dust all over the rest of the house.. On the way back to my p's house, Jim, who has been blessed with the gift of being able to stay in the moment, mused, "well, we'll think of something, but what do you think your mom made for dinner"?

Mom, bless her culinary genius-mommy heart, made something different for dinner every night for a month. What mom made for dinner that night was incredible Parmesan crusted pork chops which, had I known how good they were, I would not have shared with Jim. MMMMM.

BUT, before we got to MMMM, pork chops, we had a note from Mom, which said, "Julie, squeeze this lemon and put the juice over the pork chops. It's important to the flavor".

Lemon juice? On pork chops?? Isn't this better on fish? Isn't fish yucky anyway?? So, we hesitated... Should we? After the fiasco that was yet another stinky evening do we dare use lemon on these beautiful chops? *sigh* Sometimes faith is annoyingly risky, you know? Hooray for us we leaped off that cliff and fearlessly squeezed that lemon over the chops. And it.. was..... AWESOME!!! The tartness of the lemon perfectly complimented the Parmesan cheese. The lemon sort of bit your tongue, which made the cheese even yummier. Mom was right, Lemon was important to the flavor.

So that's just the perfect metaphor for life, yes? A little lemon is so important to the flavor of life. Today as I type this post, I'm sitting in my cozy cottage. The pee smell is gone. Ryan O is sitting on the couch watching Cartoon Network - and occasionally asking why I delete more sentences than I keep. And what is a blog?, and can I see the owl again?, and where is Japan?... I know that this little scene is so much sweeter because I've experienced a little lemon too. I'm surprised to be grateful for the lemons today.