A Different Kind of Moving Day

Spring and fall I face a different sort of moving day than others who might just be changing apartments or migrating to and from summer vacation spots. I face the more difficult job of relocating a giant lemon tree. Since I live in Chicago, the tree has to come inside during the winter where I place it near my front plate glass window. By spring, the tree is usually suffering from the stress of cabin fever and has to be moved back out into my yard.

This started as an easy enough routine. The tree was given to me as a 6-inch sprout that a friend grew from the seed of an everyday grocery store lemon. My friend was eager that I take good care of his one green thumb accomplishment. Every time he visited, he would inspect its progress. Under this kind of scrutiny, and also because of what is just my natural aversion to wasting anything or letting anything go – I perhaps tended the tree too diligently.

It grew and grew. And grew. Over the years, it became a 15-foot behemoth. I replanted it in a large city dumpster on wheels. Despite the wheels, it became a major project to escort it through its migrations. I luckily have cathedral ceilings, but the tree still had to be canted inside to accommodate its height. Then getting it in and out of doors was a dangerous operation that had to be carefully choreographed.

I couldn’t simply roll it along the length of my building from the front door and out the back into the garden. With its long bayonet thorns, that would have involved too much strafing of ceiling light fixtures and furniture along the route. The only logical way to move it was to take it out the nearest front door and walk it around the block to my back gate. But it was so heavy, I usually had to hire movers to help me.

Fifteen years of this exercise left me thoroughly put out with that “friend” who had visited this chore on me. And for all my trouble, the tree still showed not the slightest sign of producing a lemon. I finally felt I just couldn’t do it any longer. I made the wrenching decision to abandon the tree. Late that summer, I didn’t roll it indoors as usual. I rolled it out into the alley and abandoned it to its fate. I hoped some salvage man who had connections with a solarium or a conservatory somewhere would pick it up. But no such luck.

It languished out there. Then one morning I made the heart-rending discovery that in the night, someone had brutally uprooted it from the dumpster, heaved it aside, and made off with the dumpster. That was such a waste, because the dumpster could hardly have been of much use. I had drilled holes in the bottom of it to give the tree drainage.

So there the tree lay, a fallen soldier, victim of my war with my weariness. Its broken, mangled form rolled around from one side of the alley to the other. Occasionally, I would haul it out of the way of traffic and bank it back against my fence. But soon enough, it would tumbleweed down to the apron of some other property, its abject sear skeleton a constant rebuke to me. Its remains lingered for almost a year that way. Its main trunk looked like the desiccated mast of some Flying Dutchman appearing here and there, spiking through the effluvia of this industrial alley, haunting all my comings and goings.

This is hardly the end of the story though. I hadn’t been able to part with the tree without keeping some souvenir of it. I’d taken a cutting and put it in water. Miraculously, the cutting had grown roots. That usually doesn’t work, or it only works according to some complicated horticultural formula that I’ve never quite understood. But this offshoot produced enough of a root system to encourage me to in turn pot it – and in due course replant it into an industrial size garbage pail on wheels. So here we are again.

More years have passed, and once again I have a skyscraper lemon tree. The sight of its mother so tragically dying out in the alley has made me determined never to abandon a lemon tree again. I know I will stick by this baby – forever. What’s more, this hasn’t been in vain. The offshoot apparently had some genetic memory of the developmental phases its mother went through, and has picked up where she left off. In just a few years, after it had grown to about 10-feet, it started to produce blossoms – and then lemons. The lemons take a long time to ripen on the branches. Some are on there almost a year before they can be picked, and even then they have thick skins. But they are tangy lemons – fresh off the tree. They provide a valuable present come birthdays, Christmases. I can impress recipients with the value of my offering, telling them that the individual lemon I’m bestowing on them cost me about a thousand dollars, considering the moving costs and the daily fertilizing, watering, tending.

The tree’s readiness to produce actual lemons has inspired me to service it in yet another way. Now as soon as I see blossoms on it, I go around with a feather duster and tickle, tickle, tickle, from flower to flower, transferring pollen betwixt and between. I had heard about and even once seen ticklers in the fields - people supplementing the work of bees by cross-pollinating between blossoms since often the pistil of one blossom won’t be ready to receive the pollen from the stamen of the same flower. The organs of different blooms come ready at different times. I had thought that to be a rather rarified occupation, little suspecting that I would one day enter the ranks of ticklers myself.

 

 

I no longer have to hire outside help to move this progeny plant though. I rent a room to a neighborhood man, so now I have a helper handy to make the big haul around the block. Since this “baby” has itself grown to a bushy 12-feet though, my renter had to call on some barroom buddies to help him with the move the other day. The lads were already well lubricated when they attempted the move, so it got to be the occasion for a carefree careening, a bouncing from pillar to post along the side street and into the alley. It was risky business angling the tree out the front door and under a neighbor’s awning. My renter had attached a long rope to it to give him better leverage pulling it along on its wheels. This makeshift leash notwithstanding, the crew lost control of their charge more than once and the tree veered violently into a wall or some other upright. But the joviality of the moment readily loosened the tree from whatever entrapment it encountered, just as the men’s wits and limbs had already been loosened by whatever brew they’d imbibed.

We lost a few more unripe lemons than I would have liked, and a few more branches got snapped. But on the whole, the tree didn’t suffer too much damage. As I stood at the back gate, I rejoiced to see my renter rounding the bend from the side street. As he pulled his recalcitrant bulk along, it attempted to make one last foray to the side, scouring the margins of the alley. But then it was in the clear, heading for its home stretch into my garden.

Just then, a woman walking her dog on a leash came from the other direction. My renter and the woman recognized they were on kindred errands. As they passed each other, my renter cheerily observed, “You walk yours, and I’ll walk mine.” And that’s probably about as good a motto for life as I’ve heard.