CRACKING OPEN A COLD WATERMELON IN THE FIELD!

LET'S TALK WATERMELONS!

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There are some joys, not often experienced, but nonetheless marvelous, that make life so worthwhile. One is: while laboring in the field on a fall day when dirty, hot, tired, and thirsty, you come across the old watermelon patch, still there from the summer, drop a cold melon, and eat the heart out of it---a dripping, juicy chunk, in your bare hand!

But let's go back in time a ways...and talk about watermelons. When thinking about the good old USA, don't they rate a place right alongside mom, home, the flag, fried chicken, and apple pie?! Discussing melons will bring back childhood memories to all my readers! Remember those melons at granddad's every summer.......

Late 30's and early 40's, we left Clovis bound for Pop's Place, outside Lamesa which was south of Lubbock. After three and a half hours, and 165 miles of "are-we-there-yets?"--- we turned into Pop's, and drove right through his open rock-fence gate to his "car house."

On the way down the driveway, my keen eight year old eyes spotted three big green watermelons lying under the shady elm tree, on the cool lawn, right under the kitchen window. Pop always provided them out of his sandy watermelon patch, right across the fence in his cotton field.

Soon, after getting out of the car, hailing and hugging, the men wound up over there by the melons (where the kids already were). The uncles were there and that was important. As if they were "watermelon doctors," about to give a diagnosis, each one of the men thumped each melon and gave their opinion. I, at age eight, was a notorious thumper in my own right. I proceeded to thump each one, and I fear my diagnoses merely echoed theirs.

We leave Pop's and go forward to the late 40's. Dad had a nice section of land out near Ranchvale. On the north side of this section, he often grew maize in the summer, to be cut in the early fall. He had a big garden and watermelon patch out in the middle of this tall maize, where it could theoretically not be spotted by mischievous and thieving teen-agers.

Dad favored the big long green-striped yellow-meat watermelons, thinking they were sweeter and juicier. Many summers he'd pick and haul to town 10 or 12 of those nice melons for a summer church picnic. It goes without saying----we had all we wanted to eat at home every summer.

Along about 1949 or 1950 he rented a piece of land just a couple of miles north of Cannon Air Force Base. Dad planted maize on part of that land so that he would have feed for his winter-grazing cattle. As harvested, it is a five foot tall stalk with dried leaves and a nice head of grain. These are tied into bundles and dropped by the machine as it cuts through the field. Workers come along and lean 15 or 20 of these into tepee-like shocks, to allow them to dry and better shed rain.

We were out to the Cannon farm one cool early October morning, loading these shocks onto trucks to move them to permanent winter stacks on our other farm. There perhaps may have already been a light frost but anyway the mornings were cold.

As the cool morning became warmer and we became itchier, dirtier, dustier, hotter...then we came upon last summer's watermelon patch!! Out there in the middle of the field! There were still melons all around. We dropped several melons, they split open, and we were all sitting around with chunks of cold, juicy, thirst-quenching melon hearts in our hands, the juice dripping onto our work clothes...but we didn't care! It was like having your own DELI, right there in the field!! LIFE WAS GOOD!!  Yes, and we did load several to take to town! The only drawback to the whole thing was that our hands were so sticky we had to wash them!

My Clovis classmate since the first grade, Art, was telling me about how he and his family would go see his grandad down in Brown County, Texas. Like my Pop, he grew watermelons in sandy soil...and like my dad, he grew yellow-meat melons. He gave Art and his brother, Bob, permission to go to the melon patch and drop several melons, early in the mornings when they were cold.

Now, his grandad's pigs were wont to run loose about the place, supplementing their diets on anything and everything while roaming. Using their “watermelon radar”, the pigs somehow knew when the kids had broken up the melons.  They came running to join the feast!  Soon they were snorting, rooting, slurping nose-first into those melons. It was kinda like: every little pig on the place was there eating cold watermelons! LOL!

Yes, watermelons are truly a miracle and a gift from the Creator that gladden the hearts of everyone, particularly children. In a previous post on "Tumbleweeds," we learned that it takes 45 gallons of water to grow a thistle. Think how much water it might take to grow a watermelon!

There was an old joke going around among the farmers back in the 40's and 50's, about the farmer who put up a sign in hopes of deterring mischievous and thieving teen-agers from stealing melons from his hidden patch. The sign, in big letters, said: "ONE OF THESE WATERMELONS IS POISONED!" Several days later, on checking his patch, he saw a second sign beside his.  The new one said: “TWO OF THESE WATERMELONS ARE POISONED!”

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BY MIL

7/05/12

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