There are limes at the bottom of my driveway. That's right, limes. Those little green things you squeeze over certain pasta dishes or drop in bottles of Corona. I find them at least once a week, just sitting there, like it's perfectly normal to for limes to hang out in driveways, especially in regions where tropical fruits do not grow. Sometime it's just one wedge, sometimes a whole lime, sometimes or two or three. The limes are always cut into segments. Sometimes they're squeezed, sometimes it looks like whoever sliced them decided against using limes that night. "Nah, not this Wednesday," he said to himself, and then drove over to my house and threw them down my driveway.
The limes show up at night, and I usually find them while I'm out walking my dog, Molly, before bed. And because my free time usually involves fleece pajamas and afternoon naps, I have nothing better to do but concoct elaborate explanations for their existence. I haven't had this much mystery and intrigue in my life since that one Christmas when Santa accidentally left all of the Toys R Us price tags on his presents and suddenly I had to rethink his whole "workshop run by elves" story.
I'm obsessed with this citrus fruit mystery and have come up with various scenarios to explain it—a secret club of late night tequila drinkers; the remains of an impromptu key lime pie baking contest; a mythical creature that visits us from a faraway land, leaving only partially eaten limes, his only source of food, as evidence —but none of them seem very plausible. I want to know the truth.
Here are the facts. Limes do not grow in Tennessee. I didn't research this or anything, I am merely basing this statement on the fact that I have never seen a lime tree (lime shrubbery?) in the state.
I live half a mile away from a grocery store, where I assume the limes are being purchased.
The crime scene is a quiet residential area with light foot traffic, mostly joggers and dog walkers, not the kind of people who carry citrus fruits around with them as they go about their day. You don't really need to worry about contracting scurvy on a 3-mile jog, you know?
As far as wildlife is concerned, we're talking squirrels, sparrows, maybe the occasional rabbit, although I doubt any animals are involved. The limes are always cut into neat segments, and how many squirrels have you seen use a knife?
The limes only appear at the end of my apartment building's driveway, near the street, with no nearby picnic table or grassy area around which people might congregate. Driveway, curb, two-lane road – that's what we're dealing with. As far as I can tell, my neighbors' driveways remain lime-free. I discovered this by skulking around the perimeter of their properties late at night, which I'm sure they didn't find creepy at all.
I keep hoping to find a pattern in the lime activity, but so far I've found nothing. Every night I take Molly for a walk, and every night I report my findings back to Paul, who smiles and says, "that's interesting," which is his way of saying, "you're weird." Paul views the limes as nothing more than a strange occurrence, and he humors my nightly updates the way one might humor the incoherent ramblings of an elderly relative who can't stop talking about The War. He doesn't understand the limes' true significance. What if the limes are the first signs of a larger discarded fruit disorder? What if one day I find a navel orange or a pile of tangerines at my doorstep? Today's lime is tomorrow's truckload of rotten grapefruits. I think Churchill said that. Except he used totally different words.
These limes have consumed my thoughts, and I find myself telling people about them in detail. "Yesterday, I could almost make out what I think might be teeth marks," I'll say to my mailman, who, I've noticed, has redirected his route so that I'm at work when he delivers my mail. My father made me promise not to talk about fruit during our regular Sunday phone calls, and the grocery store cashiers claim they haven't noticed any unusual activity near the lime display. Whenever my friends come over, I take them outside to view the evidence.
"See that?" I'll say, pointing to a greenish brown thing lying on the sidewalk.
"What, a dried up piece of three-day-old fruit?"
"Exactly."
If I were Sherlock Holmes, I would pick the limes up and take them inside. I'd look at the marks etched upon their rinds, taste their juices to determine whether they were of the Key or Persian variety, maybe sample the dust on their skin to determine how long they'd been sitting in my driveway. Unfortunately, I'm not a fictional character in 19th century England who suffers from a drug addiction, and there's no way in hell I'm touching the remains of someone else's discarded food, even if it contains the key to the murder of a wealthy British man, the true identity of an eastern European Count, or the entrance into a secret high society cult.
But I want to know the truth! Why are these limes in my driveway? Why do they show up every single week? Has anyone else noticed them? Did they come from a Corona? Where is the bottle? Did the beer drinker throw the limes away but keep the glass bottle out of the goodness of his recycling heart? Is there a late night margarita party at the bottom of my driveway every week? Is this a government experiment designed to test a rational human's ability to deal with minor fruit-related confusion? Do the terrorists know about these limes? Is this a new kind of teenage prank? Instead of smashing mailboxes, have today's youth turned toward subtle psychological tactics designed to make their victims go mad over a period of months? Or maybe the limes belong to an eccentric old man with a rare form of obsessive-compulsive disorder that requires him to discard citrus fruits at the base of every home whose address ends in a 7. Is that it? That's it, isn't it? I knew it.
