"But whether she was pretty or ugly, she was definitely something one felt they had never seen before. And, for all my displays of indifference, I had the nauseating feeling each time she prepared to leave, that she was something I would hardly see...
She wasn't very pretty, not the soft kind. Not like powder or flowers or lemonade. Maybe lemonade with disproportionate ratios of sugar and lemon, containing far too much of the latter and just a sneeze of the former. She wasn't sugar in any sense of the word, but she was sour. I had always had a concerning affinity for sour. When I was young, I would steal lemon slices out of my mother's water glass, shove it firmly between my teeth and suck. And I hated the taste. But when I finished, I would immediately grab the lemon from father's glass and repeat the ritual all over again.
She was lemon to me. I couldn't look away. I had to taste, to know, to study every inch of her creation. Maybe she was pretty... in an ugly way. In an ugly way, she was the most beautiful, captivating thing I'd ever set my eyes on.
But whether she was pretty or ugly, she was definitely something one felt they had never seen before. And, for all my displays of indifference, I had the nauseating feeling each time she prepared to leave, that she was something I would hardly see again.
It felt like I had known her for forever. Simultaneously, I was convinced I had only known her since yesterday. I knew everything and nothing about her. Like a favorite film that simply had too many moving pieces to watch it once and catch everything.
She had grown up down the street and across the world from me. They were a summer family, traveling from the states- somewhere in New York I remember - to Lucca every time the air got hot. I was full time, except for the occasional, dreadful, Christmas where my parents shipped me off to see our family in the Bronx. I didn't care for it much. While my cousins wreaked the havoc you are supposed to wreak at that age, I would walk the neighborhood, wondering where the lemon lived and how much I'd despise and adore it if she passed me on the street.
Summer times were my favorite- around the end of May, when school began to wind down and homework felt optional. Summer families like hers would begin to flock to the city, filling it with a new life. New faces, new girls, new shops open for the tourist season. A buzz. I loved it.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
We lived at the end of a long gravel path; a villa hidden in the trees. Fruit trees- oranges, peaches, lemons stood guard around the home. My nonna had planted them in her prime and maintained them long after it. After my nonno passed, she bottled up all her love for him and transferred it to the trees. They had never been more beautiful, and that made me really sad. She didn't stop at the trees- the whole house was a display of color. She always said to me, "La tua casa è la tua vita". Your home is your life. So, she made her home fascinating. An orange structure with flowered vines that grew up the house and threatened to enter at the blue doorways. Reading rooms with four differently colored walls. Sun murals above the stairway. There wasn't a lot of cohesion. She didn't feel like cohesion was all that important. Anything that caught her eye could find a home in our house.
The lemon lived in a home three minutes walking, one minute sprinting from me. Down the gravel path in a home, much nicer, less colorful, and less guarded by trees. Her home had been built only a couple years before her parents bought it. It had cohesion and simplicity, and I suppose so did her parents' lives. We never spent that much time there. The girl loved color. She wasn't cohesive or simple in the slightest. And Nonna adored her.
