We have a fruit salad tree, a tree that has been grafted with six different types of fruit. Up to now, it has never really produced any fruit. This year our tree produced seven pieces of fruit, but we couldn’t tell by looking whether they were Meyers lemons, Persian lemons, grapefruit, or navel oranges. I picked all seven and scrubbed them and cut one open.
It was a lemon. A Meyers lemon. It was perfect.
Some of the fruit was ugly. Some looked dirty. Some was misshapen. They were not pretty or round or smooth or shiny. They looked nothing like what we get at the grocery store. On the outside, it appeared that we had a mix of a lot of different fruits with a variety of issues.
Some were orange. We thought they were navel oranges.
Turns out, they were all Meyers lemons. The orange ones, the dirty ones, the misshapen ones. And they were all perfect.
Turns out, it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. We are all a bit tired and lumpy and misshapen and bumped and bruised. We are different colors. Some of us love differently and worship differently and speak differently. But on the inside, we’re all human. We have feelings, fears, families. We are much more alike than we are different.
I squeezed all seven of the lemons. I didn’t throw away the ugly ones, or the different colored ones, or the misshapen ones. I didn’t separate them. Or set them aside. Or say ugly things about them. I figured that the unique characteristics of each would contribute to the overall flavor of the lemon juice.
7 lemons produced all this juice. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect group of lemons. All of them turned out to be beautiful and bountiful.
We filled many ice cube trays with the juice. We will use them for salad dressings, desserts, for flavoring fish, for fruit salads, for all kinds of recipes. If we had thrown away the damaged and imperfect pieces of fruit, we would have lost out on a lot of delicious juice.
Happy-Grow-Lucky 