All worth it.

A big truck, an untied shoelace, and a recipe for lemon-tahini dressing.

Hello, friends!

I’ve been thinking a lot about lemons lately.

Bright-yellow lemons in summer always remind me of the enormous kitchen in the villa in Tuscany where Danny and I taught cooking classes, more than a decade ago now. Sun splashed through the windows. The air was warm. Life felt languid and easy. The lemons were fresh from Amalfi.

That was the good life.

Every day, in that spacious kitchen, I felt up a couple of lemons. They were heavy and lumpy, skin dimpled like elbows. I learned to massage lemons with my palms because it breaks up the tension inside them and lets the juices release.

This kitchen where I'm squeezing lemons from Safeway doesn't quite feel the same. It's tiny, pinched, and the sink faces a gray wall. Dark. The little kitchen in this apartment we've been living in for the past 15 months has dimmed my usual shiny enthusiasm for food.

Maybe that’s why my eyes have been looking for yellow these days.

My mind often slides down little rabbit holes like this, then tries to learn everything I can. I reach for shiny objects buried in the earthen walls and the space between them.

This is how I know that the hex code for lemon yellow is #FAFA33. That particular shade of lemon automatically evokes feelings of optimism, energy, and spontaneity. The creators of Inside Out chose yellow for Joy’s primary color for that reason. But they gave her blue hair for visual contrast or she would have looked like a glowing lemon drop. (I believe they also made her hair blue to show her connection with Sadness, a touch I love. It’s true. )

Plenty of companies use yellow in their logos (about 21% from the statistics I read) but not mine. I tried making a new logo for my website on Canva, when I was struck by the idea and I was procrastinating against packing cookbooks into boxes — because I do love lemon yellow. But It just looked too blaring and forced to me.

Then again, I’m really not a good logo designer. Subscribing to Canva does not make me a graphic designer. (Neither does typing what I want to see into an AI chat box. I made the mistake of trying that for a couple of years. Thankfully, those days are gone.)

However, I’ve looked at this Google Image search for peelable lemon-yellow wallpaper more than once, scheming for a new space.

You see, everything is about to change this week.

This is good, the oh-so-very good.