Remarks on Color: Lachrymose Lemon
August's Hue

by Eve Wood | Aug 17, 2021

William Scott, Bowl Eggs and Lemons, 1950

Lachrymose Lemon cannot stop weeping. She sobs uncontrollably at everything all the time: the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, softball games, dinosaur conventions, the day her favorite chicken finally laid an egg. From the moment the sun rises to the last feeble rays of the day, Lachrymose Lemon greets the world through her tears. She’s what’s called an “indiscriminate crier,” “a perpetual weeper,” “a permanently salty dog,” and these monikers have served her well as for decades her tears have been used to great effect, though she claims manipulation never once entered her mind.

Crocodile tears helped her purchase her first home, a grand affair that sadly overlooked a pig farm in Wisconsin; an Audi convertible with a license plate that reads “cry me a river,” and several whirlwind trips around the world. Lachrymose Lemon discovered that most people are more than happy to lower the price on just about anything in assurance that the sobbing might finally come to an END. In fact, she cries so much that the Guinness Book of World Records once interviewed her for a special edition called The Extreme Body which included a man with hemorrhoids the size of grapefruits.

She hasn’t watched a sad movie in over thirty years and those various YouTube videos of abandoned and abused animals send her over the edge every time. The governor of California once approached Lachrymose about the drought crisis with the idea that her excessive tears might be desalinized, which could possibly save the entire West Coast from immolation. She agreed quite eagerly at first only to cry about it for absolutely no reason later.

On any given day you can find various buckets indiscriminately placed throughout the house in case a sudden deluge overcomes her. Her husband often complains that he has yet again “kicked the bucket” on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The fact their house is a veritable minefield of tears makes it impossible to socialize, and so Lachrymose Lemon bumbles on into her oh so solitary life, sour and forever alone.