The meaning of watermelons

A watermelon is lurking beneath half-eaten jams and wilting salad greens in the bottom of our fridge. Somehow, in the madness of steamed puddings and glazed ham, Rosie forgot it. Now she’s packed her bags and headed for the frostier climes of Head Office in The Hague. And there it is, just sitting, waiting. I can’t ignore it any longer.

The bulbous green and red fruit stares vacantly at me from the empty crisper drawer, daring me to unwrap it.

But I don’t touch it.

Gazing at the melon’s variegated skin, I am assailed by memories. The empty kitchen is invaded by squealing five-year-olds. Cupboards and walls fade into the background and once again we’re running through sprinklers on the lawn, juice streaming down our faces as we bite into slices shaped like giant smiles, while parents watch, sheltered indoors.

Our suburban backyard had its own special relationship with watermelons. In a peculiarly antipodean incarnation of Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit loved nothing more than to eat the rinds off watermelons after we’d polished off the pink flesh. He would gnaw at them and leave them to lie stinking, rotting in the hot summer sun. In my mind, the smell of decaying melon will forever be blended with the grassy tang of rabbit poop steaming under the sprinklers in the baking January heat.

As children, we told each other tall tales of what would happen if you accidentally ate a black watermelon pip (trees would grown in your belly of course). And, once, just once, Rosie and I stole a quarter-melon from Mr Mac, the grocer on Smith Street. We ran and ran and hid under the burning metal slide in the playground, watching the other kids play chasy between the peppercorn trees, feeling the tepid, sweet juice dribble down our chins before it evaporated in the haze. Our breath came in gasps and our hearts were pounding, but we weren’t afraid. It was healthy exertion that made our chests heave.

Years later, when we were all grown up, Rose and I travelled to Argentina. There, we watched as piles of melons bumped and bounced in a wooden horse-drawn cart alongside snaking highways crawling with cars. We chose a corner store selling Coca-Cola to stock up on refreshments, seeking refuge from the blazing light of yet another southern summer — our twentieth this time. The melon cart passed us by.

As well-travelled young gringos, sipping our soft drink, we expounded on the divide between rich and poor; the horses, the highways. We avoided the temptation to tip the unsolicited porters who would have loaded our bags onto the long-haul Argentinian buses; our Australian student budgets wouldn’t stretch that far, and we were perfectly capable of loading the bags ourselves. How self-sufficient we were! We joked about emerging unscathed from a pickpocket scam near Estación Retiro, and swapped speculation about the shanty town nearby; our first-world curiosity spilling over only so far, so that fear kept us away. We wondered about the watermelon-seller.

Back home, we sliced watermelon rinds to make curries and learned how the seeds could be transformed into spices. Meanwhile, on the television, young West Indies cricket fans bit into giant slices of the thirst-quenching fruit in an advertisement for take-away food that spun half-way round the world.

The furor across the Pacific Ocean was intense. In the other ‘New World’, images of dark-skinned children and summertime childhood foods recalled a history that was not our own: one that we, on the other side of the globe, only half understood. Our own shameful history had nothing to do with the summer fruit. We railed thoughtlessly against those from another continent, with their strange food obsessions. We preserved our backyard memories — of sprinklers, melons and dust. No racism here.

I would not have believed, had you told me at the time, that some years later, a newly-elected US president would receive correspondence featuring images of melons, while other pictures would spread throughout the racist underbelly of the web. I would have continued not believing, but the years passed, and we were no longer twenty.

From the foothills of middle age, I saw Rose off at the airport.