watermelon

Food is such a loaded word, isn’t it? It’s necessary for survival. It’s seed, soil, and sunlight turned sustenance. It’s a source of pleasure and pain. We gather around it. We stress about it. It’s the center of our celebrations. We grow it. We cook it. We burn it. We waste it. We love it. We hate it. We treat it like our best friend and then our enemy. We create beauty with it. We create memories with it. We smell it and savor it. It can hurt us and heal us. We share it and receive it. We live with it, and we love with it.

I’ve recently been reading Suleika Jaouad’s new book, The Book of Alchemy, which I highly recommend. One of the journal prompts suggested that I write about a food that transports me to another time and place. I’m sharing my journal entry below. To be honest, this feels very personal to me. But I want to share it as a reminder to you that food can be such a beautiful part of our lives. It can certainly be a complicated thing to navigate. My hope is that we can develop a healthy appreciation and relationship with this beautiful gift we interact with every day that has the potential to bring so much joy, connection and vitality to our lives.

Watermelon

Mom says she constantly craved it when she was pregnant with me. 

To me, it tastes like a simple, sweet summer on a farm far away in time and place.

I’m transported back to hot, sticky days in the shade of my grandparents’ carport. 

Pa would take a break from working the garden and the cattle to pick the best-looking melon straight from the vine.

We waited in eager anticipation. Saltshaker in one hand. Spoon in the other.

No knife. No table required.

Just an expertly busted open watermelon on the ground. 

I swear the juice was infused with freedom. 

The normal rules could be found up the stairs and locked inside the cozy house.

On this shady slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere Tennessee, we suddenly found ourselves free to be messy and hungry and silly around this one magical melon.

Juice and seeds and stray salt and rinds littered the ground. 

Shirts were soaked in sweet red nectar – if a shirt was being worn at all.

And then, when the last bit of precious fruit was scraped from the deep green rind and every drop of juice had been savored, Ma would swoop in with the water hose that had the power to cover up what had just gone down there.

Nothing was safe from the soaking spray – ground, hands, feet, bellies, faces, furniture.  The water would wash away every piece of evidence that for a moment in time we had all shared this uncivilized pursuit and capture of

pure delight.

Should any outsider happen upon the scene, it would be our little secret that only moments before we had been spitting black seeds and slurping salt doused juice from sticky spoons.

I’ve often wondered what Pa felt watching the people he loved devour the perfect fruit of his labor.  That delicious treat that sprouted up from soil he tilled, seed he planted, and a plant he tended so we could taste that moment.

I hope he felt Joy. Pride. Satisfaction. I wish he could’ve known it was going to be a treasure.

To me, watermelon tastes a lot like freedom.  And with just a little shake of salt, I also pick up on not-so-subtle hints of

love.