A pirate's life for me

I'll probably lose most of my friends now, because I am a thief.

A pilferer.

A pirate.

Yes.  I am.  I stole lemons from a tree down the alley that, year after year, grows a giant bounty of bright yellow lemons which then fall to the ground, rotten and ruined.  This particular tree is growing in the back yard of a rather neglected house with two detached apartments facing the alley.  For a while drug dealers lived there and the neighborhood suffered from round-the-clock unsavory traffic until the landlord got wise and threw the bums out.  Peaceful non-lemon-picking tenants live there now.

Now the criminal element is me.

The house behind mine was vacant until a few years ago.  There are two lemon trees in the yard.  When nobody lived there we helped ourselves to bags of fabulous lemons but now the homeowner gets them, which is fair but sad.

There are lovingly tended lemon trees in several yards nearby, some sporting handmade signs: "please, don't take my lemons", and I would never ever take any of those lemons.

I have my own adolescent  Meyer lemon tree from which, this year,  I harvested one large and two tiny fruit.  We were sad when those were gone.

But those abandoned lemons, going to waste every year, were also sad.  I can see them out my kitchen window.  "Make me into limoncello!"  I can hear them crying, "It will be heavenly!"

So I took some.  Well, Lillian and I did.   Pirate's booty, as it were.

One more sad thing.  Those wretched lemons are as dry as soda crackers.  

Crime, it seems, does not pay.