Sunshine Picklelime (2 page)

“What should we do, Lemon Pie?” PJ asked, cupping her hands around his body. “I can’t throw you out, and we haven’t finished your singing lessons yet!”

Gentle sea breezes began to stir the branches under Lemon Pie. After a few moments, he said, “I’m growing too big to be hidden by your hair for much longer, PJ. We both know that. You’ve taught me a new way to sing. The warblers might not recognize my voice, but who cares about them? Perhaps it’s time I flew down to the coast to help rescue the seabirds and their eggs. And maybe it’s time you cut your hair. Don’t worry, it will grow back very quickly. Something else will nest in there. You wait and see!”

And with that, Lemon Pie began to
caw-caw-caw
like a laughing gull and move his wings. PJ opened her hands. He lifted off into the sky, circling a fond farewell above her head, before turning and flying off toward the damaged coast.

lemon neetar

PJ missed Lemon Pie
and the feeling of the little bird’s warm body nesting in her curls. Every time she reached up to pat her cropped head she thought about him. But she watched the daily TV news on the rescue operation at the coast and felt proud to think of her bundle of hair mopping oil off the surf. She also eyed the skies, anxious for any sign of Lemon Pie.

And then, yes! During one evening news report she thought she caught a glimpse of a yellow spot, way up on a cliffside. “Look!” she gasped. “Oh … was that a flower?”

“Was what a flower?” her mom asked, squinting
at the TV. “What are you talking about, PJ? They’re rescuing seabirds and pelicans and you’re talking about flowers?”

“Oh, um, way up on the cliff there. Mom, look! Our botany teacher, Mr. Flax, told us how winds carry seeds into cracks in rocks miles and miles away,” said PJ. “We have to tell the class when we find flowers or grasses growing out of strange places like rooftops or chimneys or cliffs.”

“I don’t want you climbing up on the roof to look for flowers,” said Mr. Picklelime sternly.

“I won’t,” PJ promised, and stared at the TV screen. Wait! There it came again. A quick dash of yellow as the helicopter camera zoomed down and hovered over the edge of the cliff.

Lemon Pie! There he sat, in all his glory, on a nest of seagull eggs on a ledge near the top of the cliff, wings spread protectively over his soon-to-be foster chicks. Well, it would be typical of Lemon Pie to float into a nest of lonely eggs if mama seagull was weighed down by oil or had been taken on a rescue boat to be cleaned. All Lemon Pie needed to do was
caw-caw-caw
like a laughing gull and provide loving warmth for the chicks, and how would they know this wasn’t their real mama gull?

Lemon Pie was gone in the blink of an eye. The camera zoomed in toward a group of rescuers pulling a raft of oil-covered seabirds out of the surf.

PJ tried to fix the exact location in her memory, picking out landmarks—a huge clump of jagged rocks that made a sort of V in the cliffside down to the beach. If she could find a way to get there, it shouldn’t be too difficult to climb down the cliff’s edge, should it?

Over the next few days she asked around to see if anyone was planning a trip to the cliffs. But only those involved in the rescue operation could go.

PJ knew it would take weeks for her hair to grow bushy enough to contribute to the mop-up again, but she couldn’t wait that long. In her mind, she kept asking Lemon Pie to help her come up with an idea. And then, late that Friday night, she sat bolt upright in bed as the answer came wafting through her window. Warm, gentle winds lifted the fragrance of ripe lemons into her room from Mrs. Patel’s trees across the road.
Yes, of course!
She’d create a very special lemonade stand and then find a way to take the lemonade and the money it earned to the rescue crew.

PJ opened her side window and picked out the dark line of lemon trees next to the greenhouse in her favorite
neighbor’s garden. Mrs. Patel was from Madras, India, and she was so homesick, she had created a wonderfully exotic garden to remind her of her family home. When everything was in full bloom, rows of rich frangipani and lemon blossoms ran all the way to borders of puffy camellias in pink and white. Flaming red bougainvillea cascaded down the whitewashed walls of her house. A magnolia tree, a trellis of jasmine, and a trellis of granadilla gave off delicious scents and cast all sorts of shadows along the pebble path leading to the front door.

Mrs. Patel was a generous neighbor and had told PJ to come over anytime to collect ripe lemons that had fallen into the soft grass.

PJ could hardly wait for morning. There was no way she could fall asleep. So she sat in her window and let the velvety night hug her and gazed up at the Milky Way. She imagined herself running its full length, scattering stardust across the sky with her feet. The feeling was so strong, she reached for her sketch pad and trays of pastels and sketched what was in her mind. But she must have dozed off, head resting on her arms, because she woke as silvery lines were breaking gently into a soft orange horizon.

“Ommmmm,”
came the familiar sound of Mrs. Patel
meditating in her garden. PJ knew she couldn’t interrupt, so she hung out her side window and watched Mrs. Patel doing her morning yoga. PJ loved the tree pose best, when Mrs. Patel balanced on one leg with her hands pressed together in a perfect peak. She stood so still, not even her glossy waist-length hair moved. In her pink yoga pants and loose shirt, she looked like one of those lovely flamingo birds.

As this was Saturday, PJ decided to get dressed in her favorite paint-splashed sweatshirt and jeans. Whenever she wore them, friends told her she matched the floor of an artist’s studio. She tiptoed downstairs, left the house, crossed the street, and jumped over the fence onto Mrs. Patel’s lawn.

“Oh, hallo, PJ.” Mrs. Patel greeted her with a dazzling smile that crinkled her dark eyes. “You’re up bright and early today!” she said in her singsong voice.

PJ told Mrs. Patel about her plan for the lemonade stand, and Mrs. Patel ran inside for a basket. Together they picked ripe lemons out of the soft, dewy grass.

“You know, child, lemons can be quite bitter. Come, let’s go to my kitchen. Why don’t we experiment to see how we can make the sweetest, most unusual lemonade anyone ever tasted?”

For the next hour, they squeezed dozens of lemons into a big glass pitcher and then poured it into ten separate little cups so they could play around with different flavors.

Mrs. Patel reached for her jars of lemon-blossom honey from the bees of their neighbor Mr. Splitzky and stirred in a single teaspoon, then two, then three, to find the right balance between sweet and sour.

“Mmmm,” said PJ. “Perfect.”

Mrs. Patel wagged her finger. “No, not so fast, PJ. Our search is not yet over. We need a little dash of something else.” And with that she opened her cupboard full of pungent spices from Madras. She reached for some bottles, sniffed each one, and shook her head. Finally she picked up a jar of vanilla essence, shook some drops into the lemonade, and held the glass up to the light.

She handed it to PJ and said, “What do you think, child?”

PJ stirred the juice and held it under her nose for a few moments, as Mrs. Patel had done earlier. Then she sipped. And sipped. And sipped. The liquid filled her mouth with a gloriously unusual sweetness and freshness and just a dash of vanilla. It was like nothing she had ever tasted before.

“Come,” said Mrs. Patel, clapping her hands. “Let’s go into production. We have
dozens
of lemons to squeeze, young lady. No time to waste! Help me make some room in the fridge for the jugs.”

Mrs. Patel set up their work space on the countertop that overlooked her flowering frangipani trees in the garden. She slipped some Indian music into the CD player and showed PJ how to move her fingers in rhythm to turn the lemon squeezing into a special dance of its own.

After PJ and Mrs. Patel made ten jugs, filling the kitchen with the heady scent of lemon, they knew they were almost there. They brought some of the lemon peel outside to dry and stored some in the fridge for Mrs. Patel to use in her homemade chutney. They took leftover pulp to the compost bin at the far end of the garden.

Now it was time to create the lemonade stand. They set up a folding table and stools at the corner of the street where neighbors passed by on foot and bicycles on their way to work or shop. The morning had a warm, creamy softness about it, and since it was Saturday, nobody seemed to be in a frantic rush.

“Let’s make it look pretty,” Mrs. Patel suggested.

She spread out a yellow handwoven tablecloth with a
bumblebee design. PJ placed two huge pitchers of juice at the front and encircled them with cups. Mrs. Patel put a large round bowl filled to the brim with lemons in the center. But what was missing?

“Hmmm, PJ, go and pick the loveliest frangipani blooms—whole branches—so we can display them in a tall vase, with flowers flowing down to the cloth,” she said, handing PJ a pair of scissors.

Before long, Lemon Nectar by Patel and PJ was in business. The first person to stop was old Mr. Kanafani, a Palestinian from the ancient walled city of Jericho who had come to live on the next street with his son and daughter-in-law, both software engineers.

Mr. Kanafani sampled the nectar slowly, eyes closed. Tears rolled down his cheeks. After a few moments, he began to talk about a lemon grove where he used to play as a boy and the soft, ripe lemons with leafy twigs attached he’d pick up off the ground for his mother to slice and place around plates of hummus, beside warm flatbread straight from the oven, bowls of fat local olives, and red radishes. As he spoke, Mr. Kanafani waved the cup of juice around and around in front of his nose, as though moving more and more scenes of his boyhood through his mind.

“Shukran,”
he whispered after a while, “as a Palestinian I lost everything. But not the richness of my memories up here,” he added, and tapped his forehead. “Thank you, Mrs. Patel, PJ.” He dropped coins into a cup labeled Lemon Pie’s Bird Rescue Fund and walked away, tall and thin as a poplar.

Then came the local librarian, Mrs. Martins, from Cape Town, a short, huggable lady with a headful of crisp brown hair and skin the color of chocolate milk. She stopped when she saw the stand, and pressed both hands to her cheeks. Out flooded a torrent of words.
“Ag, nay, nay, nay
, Mrs. Patel, PJ, what are you doing to me? You know I grrrrrew up in District Six in Cape Town and my daddy used to drive around the streets selling lemons off the back of his old
bakkie
truck. And he
always
smelt of lemons, hey? Clothes, shirt, socks, never mind the number of times Mommy scrrrrrubbed and scrrrrrubbed his clothes, hey!

“And
there,”
Mrs. Martins pointed at the table, “rrrrright there with the frangipani I loved in Cape Town’s gardens and the pile of lemons and everything, you bring my father back to me! Listen, I’m going to cry. I’m going for a little walk and I’ll be back in half an hour. Promise you’ll keep two cups for me?”

PJ and Mrs. Patel watched her bounce away. They turned and looked at one another. What was happening here?

A group of neighborhood kids suddenly jostled around the table. PJ had to grab the vase of frangipani to prevent it from toppling into the street. The kids poured themselves second cups, asked, “Where are the cookies?” giggled, and pretended to gobble lemon cookies off an invisible plate, spilling juice all over the cloth.

Mrs. Patel clapped her hands sharply. “Off you go, you cheeky children. Go on, off you go, quick!” And off they ran.

Pablo dos Santos y Sanchez pedaled by on his racing bike. He was PJ’s dreamily handsome young art teacher with wavy chestnut hair framing his face and almond-shaped eyes. “Aaaaaah!” he said, removing his helmet and gloves and kissing his fingertips to his lips. “The smell of my beloved Andalusia! Ripe lemons and the richest of rich olives and olive oil! Later we will have a feast. I’ll bring olives and fresh bread.”

And so it went during the day. The word soon spread. By lunchtime, a line snaked around the block. Neighbors began bringing their own chairs and favorite foods to add to the feast. Mr. Splitzky, the “bearded beekeeper,” took
some of the lemons home and returned with a huge lemon meringue pie.