June 5, 2011: Yellow Meat Watermelon

When I was a kid, one of the rites of Summer was our yearly visit to Daddy’s great uncle and great aunt in Pope, Mississippi. Siblings of his paternal grandfather, they had, as I remember it, lived most of their lives in, around and near the very land they lived on at the time. A married brother, and just down the road, his widowed sister. My great grandfather had long since passed, but these very tangible connections to him were enchanting and mesmerizing.

Aunt Hattie lived in a newly built brick home. She would cook lunch on the day we came, and my memory recalls my Dad relishing her cooking the way I now relish the cooking of my Mom and Aunt B. I recall she owned some type of sette couch that was antique. I think she said it had been used in a psychiatrist’s office. It had been stuffed with horse hair before she had to have it redone.

Uncle Homer and his wife lived just down the road in a much older home. I imagine they had raised children in that home. Though I knew none of them, and can’t recall ever meeting any of their descendants. Sometimes I wonder about these people that I assume exist somewhere.

Uncle Homer drove an old pick-up truck, and seemed to be “really old” to me at the time. Looking back, I can’t quite determine what his actual age may have been. But he was healthy enough to plant a garden that to me seemed huge.

And he planted the most magical, the most wonderful, the most incredible thing of all . . . Yellow meat watermelons. Uncle Homer would pick a yellow meat watermelon right off the vine and cut it open right on the tailgate of his old truck. The way I remember it, he used his pocket knife to cut the meat out of it. It was delicious beyond anything I’d tasted, and in my mind it was exotic. Who had ever heard of a yellow meat watermelon? Suddenly red watermelons seemed so normal, so average, so “everybody.”

And never since those relatives passed on and I grew up have I seen a yellow meat watermelon. Until today. MyFella picked one up this morning from his uncle, who makes regular runs to somewhere or another and brings back lots of fruits and vegetables to sell. This weekend, he had yellow meat watermelons. MyFella knows I’m looking forward to eating the yellow right out of it. But he doesn’t know why. And that’s OK, too. I know that childhood is childhood and adulthood is adulthood. And I know it won’t taste the way my memory tells me it tasted. But I’m still looking forward to cutting it open and eating it right out of the rind.