Square Watermelons Don’t Roll Off the Table

We’d gotten enough rain to settle the dust and make it possible for me to chew mosquitoes when I walked outside.

I remembered going to the local drugstore with my mother on similar rainy days. While she was taking care of her business there, I headed to the free library that the store generously provided. It was called a magazine rack, and there were umpteen periodicals to be found there. I reveled in the chance to read Mad and Cracked magazines. I couldn’t quite read to my chuckling heart’s content without an employee of the drugstore giving me the side-eye, hoping I’d get lost. When that happened, I tried to appear less suspicious by putting aside my typical interests and grabbing a gardening magazine. I was sure this would show that I was a serious person intent on doing good things. That didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it did further my love of gardening.

I think I read that the moai, those stone statues found on Easter Island, were put there to keep the rabbits out of the garden. Or maybe I didn’t read that.

We’ve all crawled out of bed in the morning, accompanied by the thought that we need more pumpkin spice in our diet. If pumpkin spice is good, why not add tomato spice, broccoli spice, eggplant spice, cucumber spice and watermelon spice?

Speaking of watermelon, I picked one up the other day. How do you find a one-in-a-million melon? Do you determine the best one by the creamy yellow field spot? The dry stem? The only one available? Price? If you thump it and it thumps you back, it’s the one? I like square watermelons because they don’t roll off a table, but they’re hard to find. Or do you grab the heaviest, firm in your belief that the more, the merrier? I went with the biggest one I thought my wife could carry. As I lifted an overweight melon and sniffed it, hoping to detect a piquant aroma, I flashed back to my illustrious bowling career. During one memorable game, I knocked down more pins than I left standing. It’s true. I had witnesses. For a moment, I thought the lovely, round watermelon was a bowling ball, and I attempted to find the holes for my thumb and fingers. Not finding any, the watermelon slipped from my hands. It wasn’t a terribly hard landing for the melon, but it didn’t do it any good. It developed a fissure and lost a lot of water. I had to buy that watermelon due to the farmers’ market’s “You break it, you buy it” policy. The good news was the watermelon was delicious, and I didn’t suffer from meloncholy.

I wish I had the money to buy a million watermelons. I don’t want a million melons. I just want the money.

Back to the need for more pumpkin spice in your diet. If you didn’t read enough gardening magazines in a drugstore and/or skipped a couple of horticulture classes, head to a farmers’ market. Do so even if you’re not in the market for a farmer.

A farmers’ market has a Mayberry feel to it. You could even visit with a beet cop and pretend he’s Barney Fife. A farmers’ market is a reunion of sorts where people meet familiar vegetables. People who are excellent gardeners, incompetent gardeners and those who say, “Who are you calling a gardener?” attend.

A farmers’ market is a petting zoo, if you enjoy petting an eggplant. Which came first, the hen and chicks or the eggplant? You’ll find uncanny fresh vegetables and ground cherries that are tastier than flying cherries. A friend recalled asking for a dozen asparagus spears and receiving 13. He said, “A spare, I guess.”

I go to a farmers’ market because my garden suffers from neglect. If I placed a suggestion box in my garden, my plants would stuff it full with complaints about that neglect. The weeds would tell me to keep up the good work.

The Mothers of Invention sang, “Call any vegetable and the chances are good that a vegetable will respond to you. Rutabaga, rutabaga.”

Try that.

If you get no response, go to a farmers’ market.