How a juicy Dixon watermelon helped me conjure carefree childhood summers

Proust had his madeleine. I had a juicy red watermelon to transport me to beloved summers past. 

I'm an adult with a job. A 9-to-5, in-person office job. I drive to work, set my lunch in a fridge, and stare at a computer. Around noon, I warm up some soup or chicken in a microwave, and say with firsthand experience that a day can be ruined for everyone by an ill-advised, leftover shellfish gumbo.

I pay attention to health care open-enrollment periods and credit card statements. Does the furnace filter need to be changed? When was the last time I looked at the clothes dryer’s exhaust pipe? Do the car brakes need to be checked? What are we going to eat tonight, and do I need to go to the grocery store?

Ah, adulthood. These are the daily decisions that dart around my brain like goldfish swimming in a bowl. The repetitive responsibilities of life dilute my days into checklists that can fill notepads and make any progress I achieve feel mechanized. Sometimes I feel as if I am on the proverbial hamster wheel.

Last August, I was having one of those days. After work, my brain hummed with a dull, wired intensity. Thankfully, the summer light stretched long into evening as I sat outside, hoping the stress would evaporate like the afternoon heat.

Beside me sat a fat watermelon. Good watermelons are hard to come by in Montana’s dry climate, but my wife and I had splurged on a regionally famous Dixon melon at the farmers market. The melons grow near the town of Dixon along the Flathead River. The large river provides the water needed for irrigating the fruit to commercial proportions, and the proximity to Missoula means the melons are available at most local farmers markets.

I fetched a chef’s knife and began to cut the melon the way I watched my father cut a thousand watermelons: Split into quarters, draw a grid in the flesh to carve bite-size pieces, and then use the flat side of the knife like a spatula to lift the small cubes into a bowl.

Every summer, multiple times a summer, pulled from a summer long ago, I’d hear the story of my father following his Kentucky farmer grandfather out to the far watermelon field. After a distance elongated by childhood memory, my father finally reached the spot where his grandfather found a “hollow-sounding” fruit, took the knife from his belt, and cut the heavy melon into slices that my father devoured with joy.

I remembered the story as I finished cutting the red, spongy bounty from the rind of my own melon. The spilled, sugary juice already drew wasps to the table.

It’s good to know and recognize that our parents were once children who had simple joys and pleasures and that sometimes their memories are so strong they can tug themselves back into that long-ago happiness.

And so, with that realization and four quarters of mostly carved watermelon in my arms, I walked into the yard, took off my shirt, and laid one-quarter across my palms as if it were a plate so I could press my face into the fruit. I bit and ate and played. My mouth skated across the halfpipe of the rind as ribbons of fruit slipped past my tongue. Juice covered my nose, cheeks, chin, and forehead, all of it dripping down my chest.

With my nostrils full of watermelon air, I was 8 years old again. I inhaled the mouthfuls. With ravenous abandon I grabbed the next quarter and dove into the sticky sweet of the cool fruit.

Taste and scent can be a window into memory. Though I knew what body I inhabited, I could almost believe I’d shrunk. My arms and chest bony again. My hair in a buzz cut given to me by my father on the back porch. The sounds of the neighborhood and my friends calling to play basketball carried to my ears on the wings of a lawn mower’s drone.

I reveled in the nostalgic joy for the sake of reveling. As I consumed, I was consumed by the watermelon. I had returned, for a moment, to simple childlike happiness.

I hung there for as long as my nose was pressed up against the rind.

Eventually, cars along the road brought me back to the present. I realized I’d need to rinse my chest with the hose, put my shorts in the wash. But the good gift of eating watermelon messily in the grass showed me that the joy I felt was closer than I knew, as real as my daily worries, there to be revisited when I needed to.