When I was a little girl, I couldn’t get enough lemon. I don’t remember my first taste of this magical sour sweet fruit, but whenever there was lemon around I’d put it in my mouth and suck on it with glee. I still love lemon most of all the citrus fruits, but I’m also fond of limes, kumquats, and oranges. Years later, when I tended bar at a fancy sports club, I made all the drinks with fresh fruit. No sour mix for the Boar’s Head! At the end of my shift, I’d squeeze any lemon, lime, grapefruit, and orange sections left over, pour the blend on ice, and shiver with delight as I drank it. I still make margaritas with fresh limes, and prefer a lemon wedge to olives in my martini.

I’m grateful to know the intoxicating scent of an orange orchard in bloom; grateful for homegrown grapefruits or kumquats sent from friends’ Florida yards; for limes from the Bad Dogs’ astonishingly prolific indoor tree; for plucking an orange on a sunrise walk at Dog World. I’m grateful for the luxury of buying any citrus I could want at the local grocery store, and the amazing ability to keep a stable supply of lemons and limes in my fridge at all times.

I’m grateful for all the people who enable these tropical fruits to get from their orchards across borders or oceans to my kitchen counter, including but not limited to the growers, pickers, packers, shippers, drivers, stackers, stockers, and the checkout clerks. I’m grateful for all the infrastructure involved along the way, including trucks, trains, planes, roads, railroads, and airports, cardboard boxes, terrible plastic mesh bags, and all the materials, engineers, builders, and maintenance personnel needed to create and sustain them. Consider any one thing you appreciate, and track its course from your hands backward through space and time to its source: you can increase your gratitude a thousand fold by reflecting on all the people and processes necessary to bring it from its point of origin to you here and now: all roads lead to interdependence.