Just over five years ago, my husband, Ty, and I moved into a 1930s home in South Highlands. We were smitten with the home right from the start. She charmed us with her arched doorways and cathedral ceilings.

This home would be where we launched our marriage and started our family. Piece by piece and room by room, we would make this house our own – forming memories along the way and shaping the house to fit our personal tastes and our one-day need for a kid-friendly space.

As that first year in our home played out, we learned a lot of new things about the house. The most obvious being that an older home is a labor of love. She will reward you with her charming details and historic features, but the upkeep won’t always come easy, and the air conditioning bills won’t always be low.

Most of our work that first year in our new house was spent in the backyard. Ty and I tend to have a more simplistic approach to lawn and garden, and our yard was beautiful but high-maintenance. In over our heads, we started pulling and pruning everything from sago palms to crepe myrtles and palm trees. We shoveled up a truck bed of landscaping gravel and replaced it with squares of sod.

It was backbreaking work, but when all the sod was down, we were happy to feel we’d taken another step toward making the house our own, inside and out.

Even after that great landscaping extraction in 2011, we decided to leave some of the landscaping in place. Particularly two citrus trees that we anticipated would bear fruit in the coming years.

It wasn’t until the following year that the trees’ limbs started to get heavy with lemons. And then, it was as if overnight we had grocery sacks full of lemons that were colossal in size. I had bowls overflowing with lemons in my kitchen. I shared the bounty with friends. I envisioned summers by the pool with fresh-squeezed lemonade and lemon icebox pies made with fresh fruit from my yard.

All of that ended as soon as I tasted one of my lemons. Rather than slicing into the fruit to smell the refreshing aroma of a zesty, bright lemon, the fragrance was flat. The taste was abnormally bitter and left a waxy film coating on the inside of my mouth.

How could something look like a healthy lemon on the outside be so bitter and different from what I expected on the inside?

Baffled by the lemons, I eventually asked a landscaper what caused that to happen to my fruit. He explained to me that my lemon trees were likely grafted on to a bitter lemon rootstock because they’re more vigorous and heartier, and it was possible that a freeze had killed the good lemon tree and the rootstock had sprouted instead and caused the fruit to taste especially bitter and render the trees’ fruit unusable.

It has been nearly four years since my experience with those bitter lemons, but the taste and texture are easily recalled in my mind. And as I’ve navigated the most difficult year in my life this year, I’ve thought about those lemons frequently. How, like those lemon trees, circumstances can change us, harden us and make us better or worse depending on how we respond.

There are seasons in life that feel like a hard freeze. Seasons that will threaten to take the sweet fruit of life and make it bitter. The only difference between us and those lemon trees is that we have a say in our outcome.

In early May, I had the opportunity to attend a seminar at Broadmoor United Methodist Church with author Paula D’Arcy. D’Arcy did not speak with advice, but her words guided us to examine ourselves. She invited us to recognize the feelings we have – whether that be discouragement, anger, sadness, anxiety and so forth – and to pay them the attention they deserve so that our feelings can move through us rather than being something we hold on to and allow to define us.

Because of this juncture in my life, I am reminded of the promise I felt that first year in our new home. That season in my life was a time of possibility, and our home was a physical example of all the promise life had in store. It was a place we could make all our own, but it didn’t come without hard labor.

Tending to our hearts can be backbreaking work, as well, but it’s a labor of love. We aren’t guaranteed that the upkeep will be easy, but to move on and find a life that’s heavy with good fruit sometimes requires heavy lifting.