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When Life Hands you a Lemon Tree

© Carol Wallace

You don't have any choice about accepting the lemon trees that life hands you. But you have choices about what you can do with them. You can tend that lemon tree, and curse the work and the thorns and complain about the sourness of the fruit. Or you can tend it, marvel at the scent of the blossoms and the brightness of the fruit - and then pluck that fruit to make lemonade.

Life has handed me a few lemon trees. Not just lemons, but whole trees. And they have all made wonderful lemonade.

I'm using lemon trees as my metaphor here, because this is, after all, a column that is supposed to be about gardening. But I'm stepping back today and writing about something more personal, hoping that it will be of some benefit to someone out there reading, who may have received a similar "gift."

I could just have well opened by reminding us all of the old TV series, Fantasy Island. The moral of that story, week after week was "Be careful what you wish for. It might come true."

About 25 years ago, I can remember hating my clerical job, wishing that somehow I could afford to just stay home and watch soap operas and read junk novels. And that wish was granted. Of course for it to come true I had to go through four major surgeries, none of which quite worked, and spend close to two years in hospitals. BUT - I got to leave my dead end clerk typist job to do exactly what I had asked for. I watched the soaps and I read. With 80 percent of my pay, tax free!

But I was only 25. I didn't even know what I wanted to be when I grew up - and now it looked like I wasn't going to have the chance to become much of anything. All the soaps and junk novels and endless days of sleeping as late as I wanted couldn't compensate for that simple fact. The potential me was looking a lot like an actual couch potato. And those lemons were looking pretty bitter.

So I went back to school. If you have to miss classes, or whole days, you hurt only yourself, not employers and customers who depend on you. I had dropped out of college at 20 - but at 25 I was back. Slowly at first - but steadily. This time I loved it, thoroughly grateful that I had the opportunity to continue to become. So grateful that I finished the bachelors and got a Masters. And then a Ph.D. I even went to law school for a while, until I got tired of being dirt poor. But by then I realized that I was indeed capable of holding down a job. So I became something. A college professor.

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