Provoked by a prompt at DVerse, this commemorates a real person I used to know. She and most of the local people who'd recognize her name are gone now. Nevertheless I'll add no further identifying details.
This piece of Bad Poetry has an epigram, attributed to Commonwealth Press:
When life hands you lemons
Eat them whole.
Seriously.
Just choke them all down...
Skin, pulp, seeds, and all.
And don't break eye contact.
Maybe Life will stop being
such a jerk if you show
it that you're done
fooling around.
...And maybe what was most remembered
about her is that she ate lemons,
limes, oranges, grapefruit, all the same.
Some thought that she'd been taught that women's
life's mission was to choose and claim
of all the calendar, November,
of all the fields' produce, the trimmings,
of all the citrus fruits, the lemons.
In any case she won her fame
not for meals served to children's cousins
after school, packed in by the dozens
(her cooking was a source of shame)
but for the way she ate the lemons.
She was a thin, sharp-angled woman,
both quick to judge and quick to blame.
"And many a time the scraps and trimmings
were all she ate," her son remembered
when he saw only old age coming.
"She blamed her in-laws, but she fed them,
however hard the times that came."
When she showed me how to eat lemons
her red hair seemed to glow like flame.
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