Lemons & Lust-affairs

a poem

Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash

Lemons and Lust-affairs

Your daughter wants to make lemonade daily,
and the sticky, sweet puddles all over the kitchen
floor as she learns how to push and twist the rinds
against her plastic, yellow juicer. By the time she is
done, she has exactly ¼ a cup to pair with her
afternoon snack. Lemons roll everywhere, finding
their way across the living room and down the
hallway, because she gave them to the baby as a toy,
because she loves him, because she begged me to buy
yet another bag at the grocery store. We sigh a lot.
Our house is too small and never clean. Juice attracts
joy and dirt. And sometimes, we forget about the joy.

But we have lived long enough now to witness too
many loves fade, too many covenants break, too many
wives and husbands die, walk away, or refuse to give up
their mid-life lust-affair. Even now, a beloved writer
continues sharing art and poems as if he is not cheating
on his saint of a wife. He will lose everything, he just
doesn’t know it yet. I watch his online flirtations with his
mistress and see the flames of his life rising up to form
a smoke signal. The world is so restless and discontent
these days, blinded to the beauty and grace that shows up
every morning like dew covered wafers, honey cakes, and
fresh rock water. Too often, I miss the miraculous breakfast
right in front of me. How could he give up a life so precious?
And yet, don’t we do the very same every time we complain
about the answer to the prayer we prayed last week? I guess
what I’m trying to say is: thank you for doing the laundry
and fixing the lights, and all the things I didn’t notice until
after I tripped over the bright, and my own ungratefulness.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I saw my reflection when our
toddler daughter said, “Mommy, come look in the mirror
and see how beautiful you are,” I am dirt-driven, with the
wrinkles of an almost 40-year-old, still carrying two babies’
worth of extra weight, but she saw something else, like you
see something else. You were my prayer request, and our life
is my sticky manna, showing up every morning like a miracle
that I don’t ever want to miss.