A Found Lime

After picking up toiletries, cleaning supplies, and tea, I was biking past a construction site. House construction in my neighborhood has been a reality for as far back as I can remember. In Norman, Oklahoma where I lived from an infant through third grade, we would explore the construction sites, pilfer lumber and nails, and once we had an extraordinarily memorable mud clod battle. Though my house was recently constructed, I was under the impression that those houses would never be built, that their wooden skeletons would remain just so, for future generations of children to muck about in and gradually vandalize. In Lincoln, though, the rate of construction as well as my own age have revealed the intensity of sprawling build sites and their houses.

So, I was pondering this immense housing unit that I could not determine exactly what it was. Surely, it was a house of sorts, but it seemed to have four distinct garages. Maybe two were front rooms and two were garages, although I could not escape the sense that cars would live there; people, though, I was less sure of. And then, at the corner with the space of a second lot--barren and dusty with gravel and scrub--in between, I noticed a large, softly glowing lime. I surprised myself a little when I got off and picked it up. I inspected it for blemishes, of which there are two or three, but nothing all the way through to the fruit, and I pocketed it. I was surprised, in part, because I have a bad habit of not using limes and letting the harden in the fridge; and because I briefly inferred it must have belonged to one of the workers.

All the same, it was warm and soft in the spring air, so I assumed it had been there for a spell and brought it home. I wonder from where it came. Its mildly damaged and non-uniform color suggests that it did not come from a super market--which usually discard fruit when it is not of adequate hue, shape, or texture--and the fact that it laid just so, well, it had a contrived air about it. For a moment or two, I half-expected it to be tainted in some way, but then I come back to my usual private response, "Who would go to the trouble if it were?" Usually I come up with no one and come to the conclusion that most people are far too lazy or distracted to commit to serious, malign mischief.

I suppose I ought to have glanced around a bit. I doubt they would even grow, but perhaps it had been plucked from someone's backyard tree. At its stem end, the breach is surprisingly white as if it were freshly plucked. The other explanation would be it rolled from or was flung out of a vehicle passing by; though, as I said earlier, I would be surprised to see it in the produce aisles for its lackluster character. Anywho, the lime has gotten my attention. It hints at this greater situation, but one that smacks of peculiarity. Limes in the Midwest... perhaps the very idea of it is peculiar.

When we witness the unusual--like an abandoned lime at a construction site--we often ignore it altogether. We pass it by, let it fade to nothingness, never actually acknowledging that the oddness was ever there. Other times, the oddness captures us; that is, the lime found me as much as I found the lime. Most of the time, coincidences of strangeness mean very little or nothing at all; but from time to time, coincidences can mean everything. For example, Miss Lauren Fulner and I met at the Gustavus Scholarship Weekend where we performed a short essay test and were interviewed; we subsequently went to two of the afternoon informational sessions (on Curriculum II and study abroad at Gustavus), after which we chatted somewhat. We did not see one another again until move-in day, when we went down to breakfast at about the same time at the same hotel (albeit, there are very few hotels in St. Peter, Minnesota); we learned we were both in Norelius Hall and shared room numbers. Later that day--after my mother and I said our adieux--I went to visit Miss Lauren where she, odd as it may sound, asked me to be her friend. And thus our friendship, an immensely significant one for each of us, was born.

It is possible that wherever I had ended up during the first year at Gustavus, I would have made a lasting, meaningful friendship. In addition, it is likely that Lauren and I would have become fast friends even if we had not met so surreptitiously. And, I might add, that our personality dispositions, similar preferences, and even academic interests did dispose us to make similar choices when it came to the initial informational session meetings as well as later housing selection. With that in mind, one might dismiss coincidence for high probability, but I cannot. I suppose I cannot ignore it because it happened just so, it happened the way a lime in a construction site glows, it happened in a way that could either be ignored entirely or oddly, even bizarrely embraced for what it is.