I don’t like seedless watermelons. There, I said it. Go on if you want about how convenient they are, how much easier they are to eat; I don’t care. I like the seeds.
I can remember every great watermelon I’ve ever had. Probably because here on the far left side of the Pacific Northwest, it doesn’t get hot enough for long enough to produce a great watermelon very often. Good, yes. Great, no. In reverse order, here are the three watermelons that top my list.
3. Summer 1976. Most likely the melon was from Hermiston in eastern Oregon. Dad was directing Scout camp at Spirit Lake, near Toutle, Washington that summer. Before Lady Loowit blew her stack. We had a staff watermelon feed one perfect Saturday night, pocket knives fairly flying to quarter out slices and keep up with twenty-some hungry young men and a handful of camp-family stragglers. We sat in a half-moon by the lake and spit seeds into the water until it was too dark to see. There was a CIT named Shawn with sky-blue eyes and caramel skin. I was thirteen and he was fifteen and he held my hand when my Dad wasn’t looking. I’ll never forget that watermelon.
2. Summer 1995. Fast forward to my 10th wedding anniversary, spent in St. Louis, Missouri. My husband’s cousin, Elaine, surprised us with our first Midwest watermelon. When the knife hit it, it cracked like a pine log, revealing a solid line of little black seeds like sentinels guarding the soft red flesh. We ate it warm in big round wedges. I didn’t know watermelon could be so sweet.
Missouri Summer ~ Gracie & Livy
1. Same summer. We were on a 5-week car trip down the Midwest that summer, three young children in tow. We stopped at my Uncle Russel‘s, in my mother’s home town of Maryville, Missouri. Uncle Russel lived on Charles Street in a 2-bedroom cracker-box with no air-conditioning. I thought, until then, that being from Oregon I knew humidity. I didn’t. Uncle Russel was as sweet a man as ever was, simple and kind and abundantly generous. That watermelon matched him in every way, and we ate it in the moonlight in his back yard out by the root cellar. We spit seeds in all directions and watched the moon rise.
Today – August 3rd – is National • Watermelon • Day. How will you celebrate?
