Lemonland

        In the terraced orchards of the Amalfi coast, rolling down into the hills by Naples’ shin, I grow lemons: thick-skinned, yellow-nippled globes that need no sugar to sweeten, only salt and a bit of mint if you are hankering for something different than what comes directly off the tree. Centuries of farmers have respected this land and its fruit. So, when I heard of this lemon place—some sort of carnival of lemons—in Hudson Yards, I flew to New York for holiday.            

           Yes, on her holiday, the lemon farmer flies across mountains and oceans to Newark, takes an Uber across bridges and winding through skyscraper-lined streets to this so-called neighborhood by the bay. With me, I take my nephew, who yearns to be an actor. 
           Ah, New York City! Tomasso says. Home of Broadway. We will see Broadway?
           America has enough of her own actors, everyone greedy for the spotlight, I say.
           Maybe they need an Italian, a greedy Italian, Tommaso says. He ducks his head and laughs. Tommaso is not so greedy; he thinks he can pretend to be greedy because of the watching too much American TV. 
           These kids, they think everyone can have what they see in the stupid box. They haven’t lived long enough, I say.
           Am I these kids? Tommaso says. Tommaso is nineteen and thinks he is not a kid.
           No, no, I say, pushing his shoulder in the way we do to emphasize our joking. Look, they have a bay, too. We are standing by the Hudson. 
           This is a river, Tommaso says. He has done his New York research. 
           Ah yes, I say. The Bay of Naples is much bluer. 
           It starts in the Adirondack Mountains, he says, but it’s not called the Hudson there.
           So rivers change their names, too, I say. 
           Tomasso blushes. His American name for the stage will be Michael. 
           Why not Tommy? I say and nudge him in the ribs with my elbow. Tommy Kent is the American who sat at the front desk. Tommy Kent wanted to book us tickets to a show, wanted us to walk around Times Square, Rockefeller Center, the big things everyone knows about. 
           We make our way to Lemonland. Concrete, asphalt, steel. Not one step on soil. Is there land under here, I ask. Or are we on a barge of manufactured stone and steel, all of the heaviest materials humankind can make, floating on this river?
           No one knows where the land ends, Tommaso says. He points down, toward the core of the earth, where land melts into liquid.
           Ah, too philosophical for an actor, I say. You need to only interpret the words of others if you are going to be an actor. 
           Is a farmer philosophical? Tommaso asks. 
           If he had left me to ponder that question, I would have thought him smarter than his years, yet, as the young and impatient so often do, he followed up with another question. 
           Or does a farmer only interpret what the sun and soil give her? An answer posed as a question.
           I wave my hand as if to dismiss him. A whiff of lemons surprises me. I smell my fingers, yes, the scent is always with me, the earthy delicate citrus, ground into my skin and fingernails. But this scent on the air? A lemony scent too clean, too pristine to be real. 
           Here it is, I say, and we see it, the oversized lemon wheels lined up on a putting green. Citrovia, Manhattan West, the sign says.
           Lemon-halved tulips, lollipop trees, lemons the size of giants’ heads, flat slices of frisbee lemon swirling on trees. Lemon boulders piled on platforms between lemon parasols. 
           We are in a cartoon, Tommaso says, the awe dripping from his hanged-open jaw. 
           Purple trunks, steel plants, foam fruit. All of it fake. Most of all, the smell of sanitized lemon no bee would come to investigate, with notes of manufactured butter and metal. Pah! I spit onto the fake green ground. What lemon is that?  For sure not my beloved Limone Costa d’Amalfi.
           Limone di Massa Lubrense? Tommaso says. Or di Siracusa?
           I have been teaching him the varieties of lemon since he toddled among the trees, in order that he may be prepared to farm someday. Once he sows his American acting oats, the land of our family will summon him home. He will not be able to resist the call of our ancestors’ lemon trees.
           Eureka? he says, the variety from Los Angeles we have never seen nor tasted.
           Maybe American lemons taste fake, like plastic medicine? I say taste, because the smell in this yellow place, I can taste. A lemon cough drop with antiseptic menthol in the divot.
           Wipe the disgust away, Tommaso says, and I drop the furrowed crease where my nose joins my forehead. Tomasso is the future.
           Yes, we are here, I say. We are here in the land of lemons! 
           I thread my arm through Tommaso’s arm triangle and we dance a jig among the façade of lemons, enveloped by a mist of false belief that this creation of human hands is as amazing as the quiet groves of green and yellow settling under a sky so blue perhaps it is fake, perhaps this whole world is untrue, and we are apparitions floating through the mind of God, oversized and completely unnecessary, joyfully shouting our presence, with our loud,  yellow words: Here! Here! We are here, too.