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Life, lemon drops, and the goodness of God

I can’t imagine what my mother had to take to the dry cleaners in those days. We were homesteading in the 1980s and lived in a one-room house with no indoor plumbing in the middle of nowhere Texas Hill Country. 

Every summer, we coaxed a garden from dry caliche. My dad raised beefalo. We did most of our laundry on the porch in an old ringer-washer and hung it on the line to dry in the wind and sun.

What was dry-cleaning anyway? I had wondered about that. How could you get clothes clean without water? 

But I can remember pulling in under the sandstone drive-through of what had been a filling station but had been converted to the dry cleaners. We were driving our 1966 turquoise Dodge sedan with no air conditioning. 

My mother cranked the window down all the way and handed the attendant the bag of clothes in exchange for the claim ticket.

If we were lucky, the attendant would hand out lemon drops, one for each of us. 

You couldn’t get your hopes up though because the lemon drops were not a sure thing.

You had to try not to care whether there were lemon drops or not and then act surprised and grateful if they came your way. 

Certainly, there was no call for pouting or whining if the drops failed to appear when the ticket was handed over.

But when there were lemon drops, you tucked the sweet-tart, yellow, sugar-coated morsel in your mouth and savored it for as long as it lasted. 

And that is when you knew deep down that God was good. Sometimes he answered your prayers, and sometimes he didn't. And when he didn't, you told yourself there would be a next time, and the lemon drop would be even sweeter then.

“But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me,” (Psalm 131:2, NIV).

Image: Boyd's Retro Candy

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