Prompt: “Lemons”

Timed write, date not certain

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

I have something new for them, said the Goddess as she stretched out on her bed of clouds and her airy attendants oiled her body. Her husband the God half-listened. He never cared about her new ideas. Why, just 100 years ago she’d come up with snow but did you think he’d give her any credit. No, no, no. Him and other gods hanging around an outdoor grill, cooking up whole steers, and him going on and on about that time he came up with rain. She can only roll her eyes and sigh. And yet she tries again to have him value her ingenuity and hard work. Lemons, she says, lemons that will grow on trees and be the color of the sun that will become eventually the most popular, best selling scent know to mankind — that and apple spice, depending on the year and the season. It’ll be in furniture oil, in pound cake, with homemade pasta and cream, in sorbet, in Renuzit room spray, in air fresheners for sale at the car wash, in Love’s lemon products for teenage girls growing up in the 70s. One in particular will equate Love's lemons with what it takes to be popular or grow breasts. She’ll wish she could use it to lighten her hair the way Julie B does. She’ll forget that her own hair is naturally blonder than Joni Mitchell’s. She’ll buy the exact same swimsuit in a size 4 that Julie B rocks as a size 8, with Love’s lemon scented breasts spilling over the top. She’ll slather Love’s lemon lotion all over her own bony shoulders if Julie B will let her borrow a little at the swimming pool. Because her mother says they don’t have enough money for Love’s lemons. This will be an attempt to love her new lemony self. But it will not work. Nor will Bonnie Bell toner or Oil of Olay cream or Herbal Essence shampoo or Noxema after a sunburn or Dove’s soap morning and night. She won’t learn how to love herself until much later.