How to make lemonade

As you might recall, in the spring of 2020, an angel appeared to me in a dream and presented me with access to a most holy and beautiful artifact: Mrs. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the cooking blog that Emily Rogers, my cisgender self from an alternate universe, writes. What might seem to be a cooking blog at first is, instead, a window into the multiverse. You can read the archives here, and if you need to get caught up on the #lore, she has a Wiki. Anyway, I thought it a great time to check in on what she's up to. It is important to note, as always, that photos do not survive the transmission between universes, but the alt text descriptions of those images are provided in place. – ESJ

Happy back-to-school season and belated happy Labor Day, Emmy's Army! The weather here in MKE is finally starting to feel a little like fall after an absolutely punishing summer. Hubby David is rethinking his whole "now I ride a bike everywhere" existence. [The very people laughing at me from their air-conditioned cars as I sweat half my body weight out on my bicycle beside them will quake with jealousy when they see how handsome I have become.] I know, sweetheart!

[IMAGE: A man in his 40s, drenched in sweat and wearing a bicycle helmet, cycling jersey, and shorts, all bright yellow, darkly stares at the camera, offering it a thumbs up.]

As several of you have noted in comments and concerned emails, it's been nearly two months (technically 57 days) since I last posted here on Mrs. Rogers' Neighborhood. First, we took a short trip to Chicago, both to meet up with my bio mom and so M could see Into the Woods before putting on the "Jr." version for her theater camp. (She played Cinderella!) Then, we didn't publish for a full week in mid-July in support of the general strike. Then, the Rogers fam went to Greece on our family vacation.

[IMAGE: A blonde woman in her early 40s floats on her back in impossibly blue water. Two girls splash each other fuzzily in the background.]

When we got back from Greece, though, I didn't post. For a week. And then another. And another. And still another. I made excuses. M was at camp, and the girls were going back to school, and I had to sign a bunch of copies of Making Merry with Emily (out Friday!), and it had been a while since I had cleaned the upstairs closet, and, and, and, and. And then nearly a full month had passed yet again before I realized my usual melancholy was in danger of tipping over into a full-on depressive episode. And when I need just a tiny spot of sunshine in my life, I remember what my mom used to say, and I make lemonade.

[IMAGE: An enormous glass pitcher of perfect, yellow lemonade, just the right amount of condensation beading up on its surface]

"Lemonade!" you're saying. "I can get that in the frozen foods aisle at the store!" And you can. And it will be great! But there's something special about controlling every element of what is, ultimately, a very simple recipe. All you need are lemons, sugar, and water. But the ratio of each to the other is what makes lemonade so good when you perfect it. You can make it super sweet or super sour. Or you can just pour in a bunch of water and make something vaguely lemon-flavored. I'm not going to stop you! The point is: You have the control.

As I mentioned, my mom thought a glass of fresh lemonade was the cure for the blues. In retrospect, that she relied on lemonade instead of trying therapy or other means of mental healthcare surely gave me some flawed ideas about how the world works, but she did perfect her lemonade recipe before she died. So there's that!

As always, gather your ingredients first!

[IMAGE: A bag of pale, yellow lemons; a bag of sugar; a pitcher of water; a few sprigs of mint.]

Important note on lemonade: As you'd expect, it's only as good as your lemons, and different lemons have different qualities. I use a Meyer lemon, which has slightly more sweetness to it, but any lemon will do. You should just be aware that if you want a sweeter or more sour lemonade, the lemons you select will be the main determinator of that.

My mom always got her lemons from this little grove down the road from the house I grew up in. Florida didn't have many lemon growers left when I was a kid. Lemon trees don't thrive in Florida's climate the way orange trees do, but a few private growers kept with it. We happened to live near one, an older man named Mr. Davenport.

Mr. Davenport was tall and slim and white, always with a tan that verged on a burn, and he lived with another man, Mr. Williams, who was somehow even taller and slimmer. He was also Black, with little tufts of white hair around his ears, setting off his baldness. They always gave me a soda from their fridge, and that was my primary understanding of them as a kid: They were nice old men who always had a soda on offer. As an adult, I have to imagine there was plenty of gossip around those two in the far-flung extremities of the Tampa metropolitan area in the 1980s, but they were perfect neighbors and kept to themselves, so it always remained at the level of gossip. My father was among those who didn't much like Mr. Davenport and Mr. Williams. Child me was confused by this. How could he not like those men? They had soda!

I think I've told you that my mother had tried being an actress before she married my father. She had ovarian cancer as a teenager – rare but possible, like lemon trees in Florida – and though she survived, it destroyed her fertility. To have kids, she would have to adopt, and anyway, she wanted to be an actress more than she wanted to be a mother. So she moved to New York and worked as a waitress. She got a couple of small parts in off-Broadway shows, then a callback for A Little Night Music, and that was the extent of her acting career. She came back home for the holidays, hit it off with my father, and never left. When I asked, she said she got lonely living in the city, and then dad wanted to adopt, and she realized she'd always wanted kids, and that's how Bryan and I came to be. That was answer enough for me.

Now, though, I wonder if her being one of the few to befriend the gay men who lived in our area was a little way of remembering her time in New York. She always had an open heart. Dad would say that as a compliment and an insult. I mostly remember the way she looked walking down the long dirt road to the Davenport farm, Bryan and I trailing behind, yellow dress waving around her knees in the hot sun.

And the lemons, of course! I remember the lemons! Eventually, my mother stopped getting lemons from Mr. Davenport, opting for the grocery store because it was cheaper (which I now realize was code for my father insisting on her doing something he told her to do). By now, it's been over 20 years since the trees on the Davenport farm were destroyed to build an office park, so I'm inherently chasing a thing that no longer exists.

But Meyer lemons come close! Cut a bunch of those in half and juice them. (I use a juicer, but you can just use your hands to squeeze over a strainer to catch the worst pulpy bits and the seeds.) I like to start with one cup of lemon juice. Could you use the store-bought bottled stuff? Sure. But you'll lose a lot of flavor.

[IMAGE: Those pale yellow lemons are cut in half, exposing the similarly pale yellow flesh inside. A juicer sits next to them.]

Would you believe we're mostly done making lemonade? See? Easy! Now, we need to make a simple syrup, which is (would you believe it?) simple. That simplicity is probably why this is one of the first recipes my mother taught me.

If you read the "about" page on this site, then you know I started this blog after my mother left me a big scrapbook full of her recipes after she died. My mother died, and then I got married, and I think I needed somewhere to put those feelings. (Anyone reading this post will be completely unsurprised by this.)

What I haven't really talked about is how surprised I was that she left me the scrapbook. I loved cooking, but I didn't know she had been able to see that over the disappointment she so obviously felt in me. When I was tiny, she realized I could carry a tune, and she and I started performing together at church. Singing with her was one of the few times I got her undivided attention. Even then, she would spend long hours where she was unreachable, even if she was in the room with you. (The older I got, the less often she was even in the room.) But when she sang, she lit up, and when she sang with me, I loved reflecting that back to her.

A few years ago, Bryan digitized a bunch of old home movies and sent me a clip of me performing a solo at the school concert in fifth grade. I have a horrifying perm, with these enormous looped bangs standing straight up from my forehead, and I'm wearing the most garish dress. I sing, I have to say, a pretty bangin' version of "O Holy Night," but Bryan sent it to me because he wanted me to hear what happens at the end. When I finish and bow, the camcorder is briefly jostled, like someone just stood up next to it, and right next to the microphone, you can hear my mother cheering, happy. Proud, even. On stage, I look toward the camera, and I give her a bigger smile than I do in most of my childhood pictures.

I stopped singing in the seventh grade. I said it conflicted with the school newspaper, which was true, but that wasn't the main reason I quit. She wanted it too much, and I think even then I knew she didn't want it for me. She said she supported me, but she never really looked at me again after that.

She died when I was 25. I had just gotten engaged, and we had talked wedding plans the night before on the phone. She turned the wrong way down a one-way street near our house and swerved out of the way of an oncoming car, straight into a light pole. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and her blood was thick with alcohol, which was odd because I had never known her to be a drinker. Then, I hadn't known her much at all those last few years.

A few months after the funeral, I called Bryan to ask him to do a reading at the wedding. (I should post the video of that. It was spectacular – and so funny!) As the call wrapped up, he said the thing I know we'd both been thinking all those months: "Emmy, she knew those roads. She'd lived there her whole life, save a few years in New York. Even drunk... she turns the wrong way down a one-way?"

I focused on the back of David's head where he was playing World of Warcraft. He was having a good raid, even I could tell, and I watched him play for a long moment before I realized Bryan was saying my name.

"I don't think I want to talk about this," I said. "Ever."

And we haven't.

[IMAGE: Manicured hands pour a stream of sugar into a softly steaming saucepan on a burner.]

Wow! That story got away from me! Back to the simple syrup! So simple syrup is just sugar dissolved into heated water, usually in a 1 part sugar to 1 part water ratio, though since I prefer a more sour lemonade, I usually go for a 0.75:1 ratio. (If you are as bad at math as I am, that's 3/4 part sugar to 1 part water.) [You're really not bad at math.] Yes, hon, but am I me if I don't constantly tear myself down? [I don't know. But wouldn't it be fun to find out?] Just to get ahead of ourselves here, I like to use an equal amount of water and lemon juice, so if you've got a cup of lemon juice from squeezing, then you'll want a cup of water, too! Then I use 3/4 cup of sugar, but if you're using your normal, neon yellow lemons instead of Meyers, you'll probably want to use a full cup.

Heat up the water and stir the sugar into it until it's dissolved and you get something sweet and sticky. Take it off the burner, and gradually add in your lemon juice. Once you have that incorporated together, give it a taste. It's going to be strong, but you'll want to know just how much you want to water it down, or if you want to add a little more lemon juice, or even heat up a little more simple syrup. Once you've given it a little taste, start watering it down, a cup of water at a time, until it's a consistency you like. Put it in your fridge to cool. After all: Nobody likes warm lemonade. Once you're ready to serve – over ice, please. (Duh.)

[IMAGE: A beautiful pitcher of bright, yellow lemonade, sitting on a table outside somewhere, lit perfectly by the sun.]

Bryan and my mother were never that close, and my father remarried a woman my age just three years after mom died. I've met her fewer times than I can count on two hands. Sometimes, I feel like I'm the only person who even mourns my mother, and I'm not mourning her as much as a series of snapshots of when she seemed truly happy, not just a holographic projection of the woman she thought the world – and, okay, mostly my dad – wanted to see.

I suppose I've been thinking about all of this because M's always present interest in performing has gone into hyperdrive since she came out and will get cast in parts that actually suit the girl she is. Seeing her play Cinderella and seeing her watch a professional play the same role on stage, I feel like I understand her a little better and also like she's slipping away from me a little. I love seeing her come alive when she's pretending to be someone else. I also know it's a thing she has just for her that will never really include me. I can only cheer her on.

[IMAGE: The blonde woman and a tween girl who is her spitting image huddled together in front of a stage bedecked with representations of trees. The mom smiles demurely; the girl beams.]

When we saw the show in Chicago, it was lovely to watch my bio mom interact with the kids. She had seen the show in New York back in the 1980s, so she regaled M with tales of how good Bernadette Peters was as the Witch. M's eyes got wider and wider, and I knew whatever came of performing, it was going to be a huge part of her life. I wished, for the first time in a while, that my mother had gotten to meet M and see the way she resonated through her granddaughter. Or maybe she would have refused to say M's name because that's what Dad would have wanted, and I would have had to cut her out of my life.

The girls fell asleep in the backseat of the car on the way home from the show, and David and my conversation drifted into nothing. I looked out the car window at the dull streaks of light lining the edges of the interstate, and I missed maybe five or six lifetimes I'd never gotten to lead. It felt too big to keep in, so I said, mostly to myself, "I wish I'd had a mother."

"What was that?" David said.

"Why?" said a voice from the backseat, and I realized M, as always, only seemed to be asleep. "Haven't you had, like, 17?"

"Hey, M, be nice to your mom," David said.

"Oh, it's fine," I said, and I laughed. M giggled in response, and I sucked everything back inside. She asked for her headphones, so she could listen to the Into the Woods score for the 700th time that day, and I listened to her hum more loudly than she realized she was all the way back to Milwaukee. I forgot I felt anything, like always.

[IMAGE: A faded photo of a young woman with long, dark hair, slightly curly, sitting on a windowsill in a New York apartment. She holds a cigarette tilted so the smoke curls outside the window.]

I keep the one photo I have of my mom during her time in New York on my desk. There's something in her eyes she could never give Bryan or me, not even when I performed with her. Maybe that was just youth. Maybe when you're a parent, you always withhold some piece of yourself from your child. Maybe she lost herself somewhere and forgot where to go. Maybe all of the above.

Our last night in Greece, we sat around a small fire on the beach outside our resort. M had spent much of our trip occasionally bursting into song, even when it maybe wasn't the best idea. (Half my videos of the Acropolis feature her singing in the background.) She slowly taught her sister, who just likes being included in M's shenanigans, several of her favorites, and here, on the beach, seemed like exactly the place to be brightened with a song. So I asked for one.

"Why? So you can ask me to please be quiet?" M said.

I smiled tightly. "No. And I'm sorry if that's how it feels. Just when there are people around..." I trailed off and looked at her, hair still sticky with salt water, skin red from the sun and wind, her too-big Into the Woods tour T-shirt hanging off her frame. She looked so much like me that I worried for a moment that I was stifling her because she was the daughter my mom had always wanted. Wouldn't that be silly? "I'd love to hear you sing," I said finally.

She and G had become obsessed with the final reprise of "Into the Woods," the one the whole cast sings to end the show. They trade off lines, and G shouts more than she sings, but she shouts with conviction. (Also, every time they sing, "The light is getting dimmer," M always points at David to sing, "I think I see a glimmer," and he always does, even though he hates singing, and some part of me realizes she won't always point at him, and time only moves in one direction, and I wish I asked her to sing more often, more loudly, in more places.)

Somewhere in there, David started filming, and it's dark enough that you can just barely see M and G, bouncing up and down in the moonlight, giggling, singing, having a great time. As the girls sing, "Into the woods, you have to grope," G drops out in favor of just watching her sister, and the fire flares up just enough to highlight a flicker of uncertainty in M's face. And then she realizes she's got this and goes ahead with "But that's the way you learn to cope. Into the woods to find there's hope of getting through the journey."

I don't know if she knows what she's singing about. I wish she and my mom could have talked about it. I wish I had ever talked to my mom about anything deeper than what we were going to sing in church that week. I wish for so many things to be different, even as I know they cannot be.

At the end of the video, M sings one last, "I wish," then gives a very fancy curtsey. You can hear people clapping in the distance, down at some of the other fires lining the beach, and she turns to look, then waves, uninhibited.

Then you hear me, starting to cheer, just off-camera, and I can't believe how happy I sound. M looks out over the fire between her and me, and for just a moment, she smiles at the camera. She looks so happy.

[IMAGE: A photo sitting on a desk. It features a girl on a beach, silhouetted against the moon, head thrown back in joy. Beside it sits a perfect glass of lemonade and a theater program for Into the Woods. In the background, out of focus, the photo of the woman sitting in a window in New York, cigarette forever tilted outside into the evening air.]

This week's reading music: "Finale: Children Will Listen" by the 2022 Broadway Revival Cast of Into the Woods (obviously)

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