The Femminello Lemon, much cultivated in the sunny valleys of central Sicily, has a golden yellow rind, pale flesh and a clear, sharp scent. Its value for us is most poignant not when we meet it in its natural setting, in early August at a table in a small fish restaurant in Naples, but when we encounter it in winter, deep in the cold, rainy north. Then, it possesses an exceptional ability to lift us from present circumstances and can, especially when we press it to our lips and breathe in the messages of its rind, deliver a superlative meditation on warmth, summer, ease and everything that these ultimately symbolise: hope. Most of us have only a tenuous hold on sources of hope. Despair stalks us. We are only ever a few bits of bad news away from collapse. There seem, on many days, so many reasons to give up and surrender to self-loathing and despondency. This explains why the Femminello Lemon is not merely nice, it is an ally in our mind’s constant attempts to structure arguments why it might, after all, be worth keeping going. Maybe there can be an end to the anxiety. Perhaps the project will work out eventually. The arguments might stop. Our enemies could get bored and turn elsewhere. Our reputation might recover. A lot of things could, in the end, be more or less OK; even bearable. Such mental explorations the Sicilian lemon seems to understand and bolster. It may ostensibly be of few words but, when one is generously attuned to it, it has all the profundity of a short, luminous poem. It knows that everything can’t magically be made right, but it is also quietly confident of its power - as it sits on the window ledge illuminated by a pale northern light - to draw out and keep on the surface all our more buoyant and resolute ideas.
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