Joy Trumps Disbelief

I can't believe that my husband has been holding out on me! After nearly 15 years of marriage, my man tells me ..... But I'm getting ahead of the story. Let me start at the beginning.

We have a lovely, prolific, Myers lemon tree in our front yard. Surviving on benign neglect, water and sunshine, it produces a massive crop of lemons year after year after year. So many lemons, in fact, that I beg people to come take some off the tree for their own use. Sometimes those people even bring back my lemons in the form of yummy lemon meringue pie or lemon squares.

Despite the offer to share, however, we still have lemons that go unused. I've been wanting to squeeze and freeze the juice but it was a daunting task using my small, manual juicer.

Now cut to a side story. Last Christmas my son was all over the idea of drinking freshly squeezed fruit or vegetable juice for its nutrient value. We bought him a nice electric unit which he promptly whisked off to L.A. I didn't think about that fancy juicer until today when I looked at our overloaded tree and mused out loud how wonderful it would be to extract and freeze the lemon juice to enjoy throughout the year.


So here's the part where my husband has been holding out on me. After hearing my (let's be honest) whining, he walks over to one of his garage cabinets and pulls out an old but nice electric juicer. I just about fell over as I looked at the treasure in his hands, a holdout from his bachelor days.

Granted, the plastic base was yellowing from age. Granted I had been saying I wanted one for years. Granted we had bought one for my son and not for us. But it was an electric juicer, mine for the taking!

I'm not even going to digress into where my husband's brain was these 15 seasons of lemon crops. These 15 seasons of my pining for such a machine. I was just too ecstatic to have a juicer!

I kid you not when I say I was giddy with excitement as I stood at the counter and shoved one slice after another down the tube. The whirring of the grinder was music to my ears. The liquid gold that poured into the catch basin was treasure to behold. I filled six 24-ounce jars before I could stop.

And actually I didn't stop there. I thought why not make a healthy drink? So I slid oranges and carrots and beets down the throat of that juicing machine and out came ~ well, out came a slightly sour tasting concoction because quite a bit of lemon juice was still in the receptacle. But I didn't care. It was nectar of the gods to me and I greedily drank down my libation.

You know the saying about men and their toys? Well ~ this woman likes her toys, too!