The Lesson of the White Watermelon

No, this isn't my 15-pound moon-and-stars watermelon, the only one that I have found growing in the garden so far. This is from Charlotte's CSA box, because Charlotte waits long enough before she picks her watermelons. Charlotte doesn't crouch there, thumping the melon, checking the pig's tail (the tendril closest to the stem) to make sure it's brown and then, seeing that it's not quite brown, think, well, maybe it's ready anyway and what fun it would be to tell the kids in the sprinkler that we have a watermelon! No, Charlotte waits, because Charlotte has patience.

Me? I'm still working on patience. Each year I get a little better, and, in fact, last year I harvested about eight watermelons that were, indeed, red inside. But this year there has only been the one. I knew I was in trouble when I started to cut it, the children all gathered around. There should be a splitting sound when the knife first pierces the rind. There was none. Then, I closed my eyes and opened the two halves, asking the children to tell me if it was red. There was silence.

We all stood there, mouths agape with disappointment, until finally my older daughter took a fork and dug out a piece of the mostly-white, barely-tinged-with-pink fruit.

"Mmmmmm!" she exclaimed, God bless her. And the other children took forks as well and collectively they all dug until the fruit was gone, pits scattered on the table, juice dripping down their arms.

"It's delicious!" they said, over and over. Yet all I could think was how much more delicious it would have been had I simply waited a few more days. But then, slowly, as I stepped away and watched them run back to the sprinkler, I thought: they had just made a memory. "Remember that horribly hot day in the dead of summer when we ate that white watermelon and played in the sprinkler?" I could hear them saying some day far, far away. And I realized. They may not have even remembered a perfect watermelon. But this? This was special.

The Lesson of the White Watermelon