It was only a tree. Just as I am only me. And only I remember how her arms were spangled with yellow 
opals that sang to me in my childhood. She stood outside my bedroom window which, because it was California, was often open. She sang to me with her scent, a quiet thing when she was first in flower, louder when her fruit was full.
My father said I almost died one day when I fell backwards off my bedroom window sill at the age of two. By the time he reached me, I was fine. Lemon trees love to catch falling children.
If you have been lucky enough to have a warm childhood and an imagination, you will remember favorite images your youth. With a little bit of nurturing, these very personal pictures can inform our darker moments, bring us peace in the midst of the hard work of caregiving…
One of the best ways to enrich a childhood memory is to become fully present to it, to meditate on it so that details return with vivid strength. Often, when I ask people about their childhood memories, they will say, "I don’t remember much." This may be because they grew up unhappy and don’t wish to recall that time. But it is more likely that they have ignored the first and most formative period in our lives. Recollection need nurturing. Childhood is part of the story of our lives.
Poetry and pictures water our memories helping them grow. The immortal Pablo Neruda wrote a poem called Ode to a Lemon. Here is the first stanza:
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love’s
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree’s yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree’s planetarium
What is the value of focusing our attention on a humble lemon? There’s no money to be made in such a reflection. Lemons are for Iced Tea and other drinks, not for studying, right? 
Where does beauty lie? Reading Neruda (left) we can see that beauty lies wherever we choose to find it. If we can find beauty in a lemon, then we can find it in a patient’s eyes, in the song of the voice, in our own hands that have served us so well we may never have stopped to notice them – the texture of skin across the fingers, the lines of the palms, the folds around the knuckles, the colors.
What about a hand holding a sliced lemon? You have done this. Are you in touch, now, with the
wet, with the scent, with the texture of this remarkable fruit? Here is how Neruda closes his Ode:
So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.
Orbs "yellow with miracles" grew outside the bedroom window of my childhood. It’s been sixty years since I fell off that sill. Back then, for all I knew, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell lived in my lemon tree, spreading their magic dust about my little sister and me while we slept.
It’s a long bridge that crosses six decades. And its a bridge worth climbing whenever I seek comfort against some of the hard realities I’ve seen since.
I hope you will take a few moments to close your eyes. Build some bridges of your own to the islands of happiness that live in your memory.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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