LEMONADE HABITS

Every person has a particular posture in which they are best equipped for deep thinking.  For me it is the back step, after the sun has gone down, with a glass of cold lemonade in hand.  The universe is larger and my mind more at ease to probe its depths at night; the lemonade is to keep all things in perspective.  It is almost the only thing I drink during the summer, and I find that I will miss it most when the season ends.  We make it constantly, end-to-end: when the appointed pitcher is empty we open a new can and make more.  So we drink it as routinely as we make it, and the ritual could continue ad infinitum, but lemonade is decisively a May-through-August pleasure, and I am pushing the limits as it is by drinking it in the second week of September.

Hardly my fault, however: the temperatures have not fallen, and so neither my appetite for summer drinks.  It is impossible, even with accessible memories of old winters, to believe that coats will ever be necessary.  A short walk at the peak of a summer day makes it laughable that one might ever venture out in layers of wool – and multiple!  Today it seems like a joke.  Today is for drinking lemonade.

Today I was buying groceries, and lemonade was on the list.  When I leaned into the refrigerated shelves I found the closest box was nearly full.  The cans of lemonade concentrate are stocked in low boxes, like cardboard trays, which fit about twenty cans each, and it has been my practice to buy six or seven cans at a time.  Today I was feeling particularly zealous.  I lifted the entire box into my cart, enough to cram the shelves of my freezer, enough to fill a staggering number of pitchers, easily enough to see me to the end of the season through countless glass-fuls.

I am going to be accomplishing a lot of high-quality thinking.