The first warm night of the year. When the birds begin to settle in the trees, all gesture and swoop silhouetted by the burning orange evening, I go to open all the windows in the house. When you find the
stuffiness in the rooms’ growing shadows matches the heat lingering in the humid dusk, you have found summer.
Because the house doesn’t cool off, I make mint lemonade for the people in my home: the love of my life, Mr. Bagel, and our two little Bagels. My beautiful family. Last week our neighbors gave us a grocery bag half-full of lemons from their tree, before their front room burned down and they had to move. As if they could predict their impending loss, and were trying to fill their own absence before their son left a bag of fireworks next to their lit Fresh Laundry-scented candle. I thanked the kind couple profusely and set the fruit to chill in the fridge. They fit easily in the sparsely-filled shelves. Mr. Bagel has been taking his
meals at work lately; he and his boss Amanda have a great deal of end-of-quarter work to do.
I used to paint, in college. I would sit on the back patio at Nana Bagel’s house and match the colors of the evening sunset to the pigments on the palette. There is a sense of self one bleeds onto the canvas while recreating their own perception of color. I have never experienced more tender intimacy than when unveiling a sunset for someone to see — the muscle and tissue and sinew of my very soul spread out across the canvas. I used to paint, and my sunsets were my selfhood manifest.
One by one, in the fading light of the afternoon, I draw out lemons from the bag. I assess their imperfections, their bruises, and I bisect each fruit. I place each half onto our lemon juicer, the dome- shaped device like the roof of a temple, grinding soft flesh into ribbed plastic. The lemon’s essence flows into the waiting cup beneath, the weight of my body expressed through the heel of my hand and onto the peel. Brackish sweat drips down my arm, down my hair, off my chin. In the darkening kitchen, I cannot distinguish the stains of sweat on my skin from the pools of juice.
I discard the peels, each pulpy body winking limply at me from the trash bag.
I pluck the fullest, most flawless mint leaves from my family’s herb garden, and knead away the clinging dirt under the kitchen tap. I drop them carefully into the lemonade, stirring until they’ve surrendered every shred of their essence to the liquid in the pitcher, ever so gently so that they aren’t torn or crushed. I can never say why I do. No one else will ever see the leaves before they are thrown inevitably down the garbage disposal — superfluous, intrusive, unwanted. My family devours mint lemonade in the summertime; the fresh fronds leave a whisper of some- thing in their wake, something that they praise so much but never truly see.
I don’t paint anymore. Each landscape, a plump and sugar-sweet mint leaf cultivated in the soils of my personhood, lingers ever-present in the ice-cold pitcher of my soul. My self is diffuse, the sigh of a mint leaf in too much water.
In the dead of night, once Mr. Bagel is home from work, I hear him run the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink.
Anyway, here’s the recipe:
1. Mix fresh lemon juice with sugar, water, and mint.
2. Remove mint.
3. Serve. Attempt to enjoy.
