by Linda Larson
It is the nature of the watermelon to be good-natured, sweet-natured and to bring out the best in everyone except for boys ages 11 to 17. Watermelon boys are good natured themselves, but bad boys all the same. Have you ever heard of the watermelon wars?
I have known watermelon boys to tie a big-bellied simpleton of a plough-striped melon to the IC railroad tracks and wait for hours in the hot, wet night of a Mississippi July for that midnight special (yes, the same Midnight Special that Leadbelly sung about) to bust its guts.
Busting melons is a sport usually confined to neat, tidy places for the most part…Sunday morning church sidewalks where women in bright dresses and delicate high heel sandals, frail little shoes on half-naked feet, try not to slip in the shiny, slick juice of the thousand-eyed hapless guts of melon.
Seed spitting is all right…except it turns into target practice with chunks of sweet, red pulp bursting like blood and gore (the movie kind) across the white butterfly sundresses of sister’s party friends.
Into every lap a little watermelon must fall.
In the late evenings, when only the master bedroom had an air conditioner, Dad would feed slightly too-large pieces into and around the general vicinity of my mother’s mouth.
Papaw grew watermelons; he always had a truckload going to market any day in July or August. That’s why he grew them, to take him to the air-conditioned barroom he always stopped in on the way back home. He would sit at the bar where he would salt down a cold glass of beer like a man taming a bird, and show all of us cousins who got picked to go to market with him, his Wings of Victory silver dollar.
That was my same Papaw who wrote my name in a golden-meated (an experiment for the watermelon industry) melon when it first formed on the vine, and on my birthday I would be presented melon cum laude with the words Pretty Linda, Sweet Linda or even one summer Magpie Linda.
We would play Red Light, Green Light-Hope To See A Ghost tonight, around the house every clear summer’s night. Unless we churned fresh peaches into ice cream, we would have a watermelon party each evening.
Watermelon and a swim made for a party night. Too young for urges or purposes, cold watermelon rubbed on my face and shoulders or on my young, long throat between dips in the pond let me know that someone liked me.
People that ate watermelon with a fork instead of with a shaker of salt and a knife, had a long way to get by me on any topic whatsoever.
They were the people I would let ride my gray, placid-looking Tennessee Walker named Thunder out of spite.
The colder your Daddy or Uncle could get the watermelon by icing it down (forget fitting it into the fridge), the more they would horse around pretending to brag on each other. How cold was it? was the question of the hour. The answer something like “Colder that a ditchdiggers butt in Idaho.”
Between my four cousins, their cousins and our buddies there was almost a birthday a week. ..we’d have fireworks. Then Uncle Will, Uncle Jewel, Uncle Carl, Papaw, and my Dad would have us kids heaven-bound with excitement. Skyrockets, roman candles, slow burning black snakes, poppers (which would explode with a bang if flung down on pavement) and lit sparklers which even the youngest child could hold in hand and write in silver stars on the dark blue night. A homely display by big city standards but oh so beautiful to us children. Pyrotechnics came after the water melon and set us kids off into spinning like pinwheels around and around the house in the night…pursuing fireflies and each other. We were too excited to play games-we were just going wild with happiness at what light can be.
None of us kids turned out happy and well-adjusted and grateful like our folks were. We all ended up alone, or crazy in some kind of way. A few of us died in car wrecks in our teens or in Viet Nam.
All of us youngsters were taught to believe in marriage and family and now almost without exception- everyone of us has been through at least one divorce.
But we all have watermelon songs-mine is Sam Cooke’s “She Was Only Sixteen” with “Finger Popping Time” as a close second.
We are in agreement that we were blessed because at least for a time we lived in innocence, before heartbreak set in. And that it was a lucky thing that we, who as children got excited about cold watermelon and red light, green light after supper, were not kids whose imaginations had been looted, as so many children’s are.
Words themselves are like furrows in our minds turning over the old dark soil of memory into the light of now…a mouthful of cold, briskly pink melon can summon up a whole lifetime of summers. The legacy? A remarkable fondness for mouthfuls of summer.
And like old songs bring back the faces of once-adored, vivid visages and the seemingly endless hopefulness of being young, the frantic song of late-summer crickets and fingers sticky with watermelon wine bring back to me, very close to my heart, the stilled laughter and the faraway adolescent tenderness of a world that is gone.
Songs on the radio, and small, chilly bites of iced watermelon let me into that world again for brief flashes of time, and the children of my friends permit me and the ghosts which only I can see, to settle at the fringes of every grassy circle where moths and fireflies dust off memories of that sweet intoxication, Mississippi in July.
© Linda Larson 2004
