In Which Summer Is a Watermelon, and Motherhood Is the Pits

I had my first watermelon slice of the summer last week, and while I was savoring its liquidy sweetness I realized, with a sense of delight, that there was something new — or, more accurately put, old — about this particular melon: seeds.  When Flora was small, we’d sit on the porch steps with our watermelon slices and have pit-spitting contests.  The aim of the contest was, of course, to see how far you could jettison each pit along the front walk (and sometimes, if you were really energetic in your spitting, down the steps to the sidewalk), but the real point of the game was to entertain an antsy two-year-old.  And then the game became a tradition, and for I don’t know how many summers we sat on the porch together, slurping watermelon and sending the pits flying.

And then suddenly the seeds were gone.  Every watermelon, even the organic ones from the farmers market, were “seedless” — that is to say, dotted with those anemic, translucent pips that you couldn’t have sent flying in a hurricane of expectoration.  I suppose it didn’t matter, because by then Flora was beyond pit-spitting contests.  And yet I felt that a little bit of summer had been lost in the interest of ease of consumption.

You can’t really blame human beings for wanting to make things easy.  Life is hard, and it’s our natural inclination to try to soften the inevitable blows, even if they come in the shape of watermelon pits.  A few summers ago, the watermelon news was all about the Japanese, who had started growing their melons in boxes so they’d end up square, which made them more convenient to store on refrigerator shelves.  When it comes to summer fruit, watermelons pose some pretty significant challenges: They’re big and bulky.  Uncut, they may not fit in your average Japanese refrigertor (or even your average, yawning American fridge); sliced in half or quartered, they manage to leak through plastic wrap and even ziploc bags to make a sticky, drippy mess of the shelves they’re stored on.  And the pits make eating a challenge, creating a sort of oral obstacle course that gets in the way of arriving quickly at that cool, toothsome melon-flesh.  And yet, it seems to me, that without the pits, the watermelon doesn’t taste quite as sweet; something subtle is lost when the obstacles are removed.

For the past week, Flora has had a friend staying over, and when they’re not sightseeing in New York, they’re huddled in her room over their respective laptops.  Sometimes I’ll hear their laughter, drifting through the bedroom door, or the muffled sound of a YouTube video.  This seems so unfair to me — that I’ve waited all year for my daughter to return, and now that she’s here, she really isn’t here at all.  I’d imagined a summer in which we’d drive to the beach together on weekends and snuggle on the sofa at night catching up on all the great old movies Flora has never seen.  Instead, I’m relegated to the role of chauffeur (Flora having not yet gotten around to getting her license — but that’s another post) and chef and, occasionally, travel agent, as I suggest the best routes to and from Chinatown, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History.

I’d like to say that this new phase of motherhood is a little like eating a watermelon with seeds: The harder it is to get at the good stuff, the better the good stuff is in the end.  I’ll let you know if that’s really so when Flora gets back from Seattle — where she’s bound with her friend in a few days — at the end of July.  I’m looking forward to at least one trip to the beach and a few movie nights before school starts again in the fall.  And if fate and agribusiness happily conspire, maybe a pit-spitting contest or two.

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