User:Jujube

Something to Start with

If you type lemony.space in your browser, you will get to a website.

I have had it for over six years now. I first built it to learn the specifics about the web, but it has since morphed into a living archive of my life.

I used to be obsessed with lemons. My favorite dessert was a tart for which you use one, and only one, whole lemon for the filling. One year I spent Christmas with my friend's family in Portland, Oregon, a place with moss-covered trees and tree-lined streets. My friend's mom kept a lemon tree in the living room because it didn't like all the rain out there. Its pot became the favorite spot for the house cat, who might have, at some point, misused it as the bathroom. It was a scrawny little tree with two branches and countable leaves, but it bore a fruit. My friend decided to make the tart in honor of the lemon's existence, and we all said yay.

When the friend visited me in Washington, DC, we made limoncello together. We filled a third of a jar with Everclear, suspended six lemons in a cheese cloth and sealed the jar. The theory was that the vapor, arising from the 95% proof spirit, would "squeeze" the good stuff out of the lemons and thus infuse the rest of the alcohol. A month later, the clear liquid acquired colors, I was drunk, and the theory was proven right.

I listened to a song over and over:

I also bought a novel named Lemon, in which the protagonist fell in love with a lemon. Around the same time I fell for, less imaginatively, a guy. Nevertheless, I told him about the book. I wish I could say he sent me a basket of lemons or, perhaps, brought me a lemonade, but he broke my heart instead.

The old About page of the website quoted Pablo Neruda:

which yellow bird fills its nest with lemons?

When I learned Spanish years later, I went back to the same poem and read to myself:

el pájaro amarillo...el nido de limones...

I don't feel the same about lemons now, but I keep the namesake. It reminds me of stories that I forget from time to time.

Projects in Progress

• Ambacht
• Su
• Making (a Camera)

Ongoing Research

• Memoir

General matters

• copyrights on wiki