lemon thief

so i know i shouldn't be blogging about my life of crime on teh internets. but i've become a rather serious lemon bandit. my family and i have been taking lemons from my backyard neighbor's tree for years. they don't ever seem to use the lemons and many of the branches hang over into our yard. at our other property we also do an annual guava harvest from a neighbor's tree. it also hangs over into our backyard, so my dad goes over to trim the branches and also to take the guava. they don't eat eat guava, and neither do our tenants. i've never weighed how much we've got but each year we probably take something like almost 100lbs.

while those two instances are probably legal, it certainly gets into shadier territory. in my neighborhood there is a lemon tree which is overflowing with lemons. seriously. the tree is practically more yellow than it is green. last year i became rather obsessed with these lemons. and one late night, i stole one or two. it was laying on their lawn and i just couldn't resist! around that time i also "stole" a persimmon and an orange that had fallen off someone else' tree (two trees, two different neighbors). both were hanging over the wall over the sidewalk so that's why i used the quotation marks. the orange was the BEST damn orange i've ever had. seriously. since it had naturally fallen off the tree, it was crazy ripe and omg so juicy! i think this was the turning point in my life.

the other turning point. i started volunteering for a produce gleaning group. first with food forward and later with socal harvest. home owners (or parks and the like) contact the organizations who send volunteers over to harvest ripe produce. all that produce is then donated to local soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and the like. it's amazing stuff since much of this produce (usually fruit) would've been wasted anyway, and while soup kitchens and stuff do get a lot of donations, much of it is canned and not fresh. so anyway, the turning point is that i not cannot stop seeing fruit on people's trees. and worse yet, i can't stop thinking about getting my hands on it!

so i've gone a bit nuts. i've actually recruited people to help me steal fruit. seriously. we used broom handles to bring the branches of my backyard neighbor's tree within reach. i've gone back repeatedly to that other tree. all told i've stolen maybe 25 lemons. most of which i give away, either to friends or to my volunteer group, lol.

anyway, i just wanted to get this "off my chest" since it really has become one of my hobbies. btw, i went with a friend to that other lemon tree and knocked on their door to ask them if we could just have some lemons. they did not answer.