Watermelon

› WASHINGTON, DC, 2009................

I didn’t realize that people actually paid for watermelon until I went away to college. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina where I grew up, there were melon fields all over the place, and while the growers certainly shipped their melons to markets and grocers across the country, some of them even operating roadside stands near their fields, there were also often pyramids of the heavy fruits stacked near the road for people to take what they wanted. Down on Edisto Island, we would often have huge meals in the middle of the day, with two meats—say, fried chicken and ham—and a plethora of the local produce from the neighboring truck farms: squash and okra, field peas and tomatoes, corn, butterbeans, cucumbers, and, for dessert, watermelons. Mrs. McGee always had a cake, pie, or cobbler as well, and we would all gorge ourselves on the bounty, napping and playing cards and board games for an hour after lunch before we could head back into the surf. We would often take long slices of watermelon—they were nearly always the Charleston Gray variety, the long, striped preferred melon of the Lowcountry—with us into the water, where we would swim out beyond the breakers, allowing the slices to float amongst the swells, salted by the splashing foam.