New Feature on NPR’s Here & Now

Howdy, fellow critters! 

Remember last week when it was so cold you had to wait five minutes for your windshield to defrost? Then, halfway through the week, you walked outside, and it felt like a tropical rainforest. The mulch in my backyard transformed from peanut brittle to dirt molasses overnight. Many worms fled from my compost. 

I did take advantage of the warm weather to roller skate, but it was so warm Friday night that the skatepark ramps started sweating. I dropped in on ramp pit stains and did 360s over puddles. Nonetheless, I shredded. 

Last week, NPR’s Here & Now aired my story on the new National Park Service program that is buying homes in Rodanthe—a small village in the Outer Banks—to demolish before they fall into the ocean. The story briefly trended #1 on the show’s website, which is neat until you realize you can still hear the dregs of COVID in my throat. I hope it was more Phoebe-sick-voice and less Golem-fiending-over-the-One-Ring. Either way, check it out and let me know what you think! 

Story time. 

This has nothing to do with environmental news, but enjoy this essay about my family and our lemon tree. 

My family’s interests have converged throughout the years. We have always enjoyed overlapping musical tastes, whether we’re playing instruments together or listening to a collaborative playlist, and my father and I share an interest in similar movies and TV shows. We all enjoy cooking, often gifting one another cookbooks and sharing recipes. A typical Turner family gathering involves planning a meal a few days before, divvying up grocery responsibilities, cooking together, and then drinking and playing games. 

But most notably, our family has become increasingly taken with nature. I purchased the board game Wingspan for my father and sister this year for Christmas. The game is a delight, but my favorite feature is the cards. Each one features a detailed illustration of a bird and a fun fact like peregrine falcons can dive at speeds up to 200 mph. We established a rule that players must read their bird fact whenever they play a bird in its habitat. It has since been brought to my attention that we are not unique in instituting this rule while playing Wingspan. 

Anyway, our interest in the natural world has extended to gardening. My parents are avid home gardeners—have been as long as I’ve been around—growing tomatoes, peppers, carrots, and all manner of produce. They planted a prodigious fig tree, whose thick, felt-like leaves fan outwards toward the path leading from the driveway down to the backyard. The plant is young, but it produces the most succulent fruits every summer. We’d experiment with jam-making and pies if we could ever abstain from eating the figs straight off the tree. 

In addition to the very generous fig tree, my parents bought a small Meyer lemon tree three years ago. The tree began as a cutting, a mere twig about the length of your forearm. In 2022, my dad pollinated the plant with a Q-tip, swabbing the male flowers and dabbing the pollen onto the female flowers’ “sticky ball.” He must have succeeded, too, because, for the past year and some change, the diminutive tree endeavored to produce a single giant lemon. 

The giant lemon (which I will henceforth animate with “they/them” pronouns) grew quickly but remained unripe through the summer. They grew so large my mom propped them up on a fertilizer box to keep them from toppling the parent plant. This improbable lemon’s journey to ripeness took on a religious aspect in my mind, so I bequeathed them the moniker “Sacred Lemon.” 

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A week before Christmas, my family got together to make holiday cookies. A Turner family tradition, my dad baked the cookies and prepared green, white, blue, and red frosting for decorating. Before the decorating commenced, my mom asked if we would like to harvest the Sacred Lemon. We marched to the basement, where the Sacred Lemon basked in artificial light upon its box. The family gathered in a half-circle around my sister, who, with many a reverent twist, plucked the Sacred Lemon from their stem. 

The lemon nourished us first in slices. We chomped, and though this lemon was as sour as they come, the Sacred Lemon blessed us with a sweetness not tasted among their storebought kin. Next, my father zested the lemon, mixing the peel flakes into a sugary mixture to create yellow icing. The icing was electric; every bite sent a pleasant tingle along the jaw. Yellow played a prominent role in this year’s Christmas cookies. 

The lemon’s final blessing took the form of lemonade mixed with limoncello, which my parents had brought home from Italy last summer. I salvaged 12 seeds from the Sacred Lemon, intending to plant them later. I am often averse to looking things up—as many afflicted with my particular gender identity are wont to be—so I embraced the path of science instead. I folded three seeds in a wet paper towel. Three more I dropped into a cup of water. I divvied up the remaining six between two cups of dirt. Surely, I thought to myself, one of these methods will succeed. 

The experiment came home with me. Some seeds sat on the windowsill alongside my ogre ear cactus and various herbs. The two dirt cups found a home next to the pothos on my wall shelf. I introduced the seeds to their neighbors and welcomed them into the fold. I waited. 

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. The paper towel often dried out without my noticing. Mold appeared in one of the dirt cups. A cursed rock I had prepared for my friend’s Secret Santa gift sabotaged me. I found this rock in the wild, unaware that it was cursed, and brought it home. I imbued it with life (glued googly eyes on it). I needed to store it until the gifting, and since the pet rock wasn’t ugly, I decided to display it on my shelf until Secret Santa. I placed the rock between the two dirt cups and turned to water my hanging Fittonia. 

Crash. 

The scene behind me was a disaster. My precious seeds lay strewn across the floor. The wall shelf dangled from the wall, devastated by the rock’s cursed energy. Two googly eyes looked up at me from the debris field. Dirt penetrated the tight curls of my white carpet. Pieces of glass that I’m still finding to this day littered the floor. I put the Judas rock on my dresser and turned it to face the wall. 

A month passed. I dutifully watered my dirt, though I admit I didn’t expect anything to come of it. Perhaps some combination of fungi and microorganisms benefitted from the intermittent wetness, but I certainly didn’t suspect a thirsty root. Then, two weeks ago, one of the seeds sprouted. When I say sprouted, I really mean erupted; the cup looked barren the day before, then, when I checked it the following night, Spawn of the Sacred Lemon stood at attention like a Buckingham Palace Guard. They have since been joined by a sibling, the Second Spawn of the Sacred Lemon.

I’ll be back next week! In the meantime, stay well and tell your plants you love them. 

Bye, 

Zack 

Thank you, Arianka Ibarra, on Unsplash for the header image.