The Lemon Tree

He was eight years old the summer the lemon tree went mad.

It was 1962. He was staying with his grandmother, as he stayed every summer, in the village where his mother had been born. It was a small place on a hillside in Calabria, three hours by bus from the city. The road ended at the church. The square was empty from noon until five, because no one in their right mind was awake. His grandmother's house was at the bottom of the village, past the fountain, down a lane too narrow for a car. The house had a courtyard. In the courtyard was the tree.

The tree was old. His grandmother said it had been planted by her own grandfather, which would have made it almost a hundred years by then. It had always produced lemons. Enough for the household. Enough for a neighbor or two. Enough for his grandmother to put a wedge in her water in the afternoons.

That year, something was different. He noticed it the day he arrived, at the end of May. The tree had more flowers on it than he had ever seen on any tree anywhere. More flowers than leaves, almost, so that from a certain angle the whole courtyard looked white instead of green. The air underneath it was so thick with the smell that he stopped in the middle of the courtyard with his suitcase still in his hand and stood there breathing it in until his grandmother came out and laughed at him. Ah, she said. Quest'anno. This year. She said it the way you say the name of someone you have been waiting for. She had already seen what was coming. He had not.

By the middle of June the branches were already bending under the weight of the fruit. By the first week of July they were bending so far that his grandmother tied some of them up with strips of an old sheet. By the end of July she gave up tying them. The tree was producing faster than she could keep the sheet around it. The lemons were falling into the courtyard, rolling across the tiles, collecting in the corners like stones after a flood.

He remembers her hands that summer. He had never really looked at them before. They were bent at the knuckles the way old women's hands are bent. The skin on the back of them was thin and brown and marked with spots. There was a scar across the base of her thumb from a knife that had slipped when she was twenty. He noticed all of this because that was the summer she was always handing him things: a lemon to smell, a wedge to taste, a bowl to hold while she poured.

She began to give the lemons away.

She gave a bag to the postman. She gave a bag to the priest. She gave two bags to the woman who kept the café on the square and three bags to the butcher, who gave her a piece of lamb in return that she cooked with, of course, a lemon. She gave a bag to the boy who delivered coal, a child his own age, who took it home and came back the next day to ask if there were more, because his mother had used them all in a single afternoon. His grandmother laughed and gave him another bag and sent him home with a third to give to the woman next door.

The whole village began to smell of lemons. He would walk up the lane in the morning to buy bread, and at a certain point between the fountain and the square, the smell of lemons from his grandmother's courtyard met the smell of baking from the bakery. The two smells together made him so hungry he had to stop walking.

His grandmother made lemonade in a tall glass pitcher with a chipped handle. She made it every day. She made lemon cake twice a week, in a pan blackened by thirty years of other cakes, and she put slices of candied lemon on top in a pattern like a flower. She preserved lemons in salt in jars that she lined up on a shelf above the sink. The jars caught the afternoon light and turned the whole kitchen the color of honey. She made a lemon ice and gave it to him after dinner, in a small blue bowl, with a spoon that was too big for his hand.

He sat in the courtyard to eat it. The tree was above him. The lemons were above him. The sun was going down behind the hill and the courtyard was half in shadow and half in gold light, and his grandmother was in the kitchen washing the dishes with the window open, and he could hear her singing something he did not know the words to, and the ice was cold and the lemon was bright and the air smelled of everything at once: the tree, the dust, the stones warm from the day, his grandmother's soap, the distant sea he could not see but knew was there.

He did not know, at eight, that this was happiness. He thought it was just what summer was.

The tree stopped producing in the second week of September. It produced normally the next year, and the year after, and every year after that until it died, in 1987, of something his cousin described over the telephone as vecchiaia. Old age. It never had another summer like 1962. No one in the village ever had another summer like 1962. He has asked. He has asked everyone who was alive then and is alive now, and they all remember it, and none of them can explain it, and all of them describe the smell the same way. As if the whole village had been put inside a lemon.

His grandmother died in 1971. He was seventeen. He did not go to the funeral because his father said the trip was too expensive, and he has regretted this for fifty-five years, and there is nothing he can do about it now except tell you about the tree.

He has spent the rest of his life trying to get that smell back. He has never managed it.

He is seventy-one. He has a good life. He has a wife he loves and two daughters who call him every Sunday and a small garden behind his house where he grows tomatoes and basil and, of course, a lemon tree. The tree produces a reasonable number of lemons every year. He is grateful for them. He uses them in his water in the afternoons, the way his grandmother did.

He goes inside now to pour himself a glass. He cuts a wedge from the bowl on the counter and drops it in. He drinks it slowly, standing at the window, looking at nothing in particular, thinking of a courtyard in Calabria in the summer of 1962, when he was eight years old and did not yet know that he was living the best summer of his life.