Life is a Lemon Drop (A Ramble)

Photo by Ian Piexoto - 2023

Life is a lemon drop.

Besides being a phrase with an amusing sprinkle of alliteration, I have recently come to this simple, sweet, and sour conclusion. Life is a lemon drop

I guess I should rephrase my initial statement: Life is a sequence of lemon drops. It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but I think it holds a bit more truth. Life is a sequence, series, or succession--perhaps even a string--of lemon drops. Life is a jar of lemon drops kept on a bookshelf somewhere to stale, not sure if you should eat them all at once and burn the taste buds clean off your tongue or leave them to desaturate in their glass prison, wasting a delicious snack because you’re too afraid of the sour aftertaste.

With any important phrase, let’s look at some definitions.

A lemon drop is a hard candy with a sweet and sour flavor. It has a bright yellow coloration, the kind you’ll usually find in a field of dandelions that haven’t quite pulled off the “fragile cloud” look yet. If you were to bite into one, you’d likely chip a tooth, and if you were to set one on fire, you'd likely be cleaning sticky black and yellow goop off your kitchen table. As you suck on a lemon drop (apparently the intended method of enjoyment) you put yourself through layers of alternating sweet and sour shells of hard candy vaguely tasting of lemon.

Pretty unremarkable, aren’t they?

Life, on the other hand, is something a bit more complicated. The very definition of life has been debated amongst humans since Socrates decided to get himself killed as humanity’s first smartass. Some people say “life is short”, others say “all good things come to an end”, and even fewer people say “life is a pubescent dandelion yellow hard candy that makes your cheek burn”.

We all know for certain, though, that all humans experience life. If you are alive, you know what life feels like. Welcome to mortality! Enjoy your skinsuit before it wrinkles.

If we go off of what we know for certain, that all humans experience life, then we are able to deduce that life pretty much sucks--because humans pretty much suck. Humans mess up all the time. Life can’t be a sickeningly sweet chocolate bar. It’s got to be something with a bit more of a kick, something with a sting.

So where’s the correlation? Well, life is hard, just like lemon drops, but I can assure you my argument goes much deeper than corny wordplay.

That alternating sweet and sour sensation you experience while sucking on a lemon drop? That’s life right there, that back and forth tug-of-war between the terrible moments of life to the vignettes or happiness that make it all worth it in the end.

And at the end of the lemon drop, you're left with two choices. You can either crack the hard candy between your teeth, shattering into a million sugary fragments and sending your orthodontist into a fit of rage, or you can wait until it dissolves perfectly in your mouth and disappears into nothingness. Life is full of so many choices.

A lemon drop is a moment in life. It's a series of ups and downs, sweet and sour moments, that ends in a very important choice. Do you shatter the experience from your memory, experience the blissful ignorance of knowing you did the “best” you possibly could do, or do you savor both the sweet and sour of that precious moment, allowing the lemony aftertaste of experience linger on your tongue for just a few seconds longer?

Because trust me, you don’t want to splinter that last lemon drop between your teeth only to reach for your glass jar only to find the sweet-smelling aroma of what used to be.