unwind December 29th, 2009
November 6, 2009
I think I figured out why I hate lemonade! Seriously, I just don’t like lemonade. I’ve always kind of wondered why I don’t like lemonade. I mean, I like lemon drops…not Lemon Heads…but good old-fashioned lemon drops…you know, the hard candy with the sugar on the outside? Mmmm! I don’t think you see them too often now days…probably considered a choking hazzard. Still, other than those frozen lemonade things you can get in the summer at the grocery store and the water parks…I just don’t go for lemonade.
For most of my life I’ve just figured it’s because I really don’t like sour things. I’d totally rather have something sweet. Although, now that I think about it, I did go with a friend to Mesa, Arizona once and she picked some lemons from her brother’s lemon tree and made some fresh-squeezed lemonade…and after she added five or six cups of sugar…I really liked it! But overall…I’ve always kind of had a thing against lemonade.
However, you know how some of your biggest, “Ah ha!” or “Wow!” moments offer epiphanies in the middle of the night? I mean, that’s when I think of most of the story lines for my books…at like three a.m. Anyway, yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, “Ah ha! I wonder if that’s why I hate lemonade?”
Thus, I believe the reason I’ve always struggled with lemonade…is by memory association! Let me explain:
When I was about seven years old, my mom and dad took me and my little sister (she was maybe eight months old at the time) on a picnic up in the mountains (the Sandia Crest) with some friends of theirs, Jerry and Carol Farr. Oh, it was a lovely day! The air was warm and fresh…fragrant with the scent of cedar. The picnic box was full of delicious picnic type foods (including my mom’s divine potato salad), and a giant jar of lemonade sparkled in the sunshine as we set it down on a nearby fallen tree trunk! Ahhh! What a memory! There was nothing like a trip to the Sandia back then…nothing like eating Mom’s potato salad in the open, free wilderness of the mountains!
Well, things went along at just a lovely, lilting, picnic-in-the-mountains pace as we enjoyed the fresh scents of the trees and the soil…as we ate our potato salad and drank our lemonade. And then…it happened. My little sister (we’ll call her “Luanna,” because that’s really her name) “messed” in her diaper. And I do mean she “messed!” In fact, “messed” in her diaper isn’t even an appropriate description! Rather, the “mess” oozed and leaked out at every nook and cranny, through every bend and venue it could find…running in rivulet’s down her legs and onto anything and everything in its path ! Yeck! (I have a stark vision of my dad holding my sister out away from him as the “mess” oozed and dripped out of her diaper! It’s a very vivid memory! I mean, after all, we were in the mountains…thus, the background scenery for this vision was quite out of the norm…and thus embedded itself permanently into my subconscious.)
Mom soon discovered that they hadn’t remembered to bring any water…none…not a drop. The only liquid we had with us was the lemonade…the lovely, sweet, lemonade. (I have a vision of it still…glistening like liquid sunlight, as it lingered in the large glass jar still sitting on the fallen tree.) Mom was beside herself! No water? How could they have forgotten water? (If you know my mom at all, you know she never goes anywhere without water!) Furthermore, this was long before “”aby wipes.” Needless to say, the picnic was over.
Before I quite knew what was happening, my dad, and his friend Jerry, were washing Luanna off with the only available liquid at hand that could be used to wash a baby’s stinky little bum with…lemonade!
Oh, but the story doesn’t end there! Oh, no! My “dislike of lemonade by memory association” wasn’t set in stone yet! No! That happened when I was elected to hold my baby sister on the hour-long drive home! Not only did my poor baby sister smell like baby poo a la lemonade…she was sooooo sticky! I mean, sticky like flypaper sticky! Sticky and stinky…that’s what she was…and I got to hold her all the way home…at the tender age of seven…the impressionable age of only seven years…the age when your experiences with lemonade are obviously very life-molding. What happens to a child when a bad lemonade experience occurs at that age…well, let’s just say, it sets a precedent, shall we?
And there you have it…my deep-seated, psychological reasons for not liking lemonade…on some subconscious level…I associate lemonade with baby poo! What a realization, huh? Oddly enough, my sister told me just this evening (as we were discussing the traumatizing messy diaper/lemonade remembrance), that she absolutely loves lemonade. And, seriously…one has to wonder if her love for lemonade stems from the same incident that spawned my dislike for it. Hmm.
Well, another one of life’s great mysteries solved!
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