The Case of the Runaway Watermelon

Do I write about watermelons too much? Do I?

Maybe. But I had a dark day today, and finding our missing watermelon brought some much needed laughter into the final moments of my day.

It was grocery day today. And I could have sworn I bought a watermelon. But, picking through the fifty empty Kroger bags that littered our bungalow in the aftermath of kids helping unload the groceries, no watermelon was to be found. I double checked my receipt and it said there was one included, but no one had seen it.

It was a hard day today. We had a full week of homeschooling this week, plus three doctors’ appointments downtown thirty minutes away (plus two referrals to more specialists, minus any answers to my ongoing health issues). We’d still managed to do groceries and laundry, feed everyone, and make it through another week, but I was discouraged and exhausted. The baby was teething and wouldn’t nap today, and I needed so much to lie down that I laid on the living room floor and let him watch baby signing time on the computer for what felt like hours. He eventually closed the laptop, dragged the laptop bag over for me to put it away, and brought “Dino memory match” over, as if to say, “that’s enough screen time, Mom!”

I think the hardest part of having a chronic illness can be not being able to be who you want to be. You can’t live up to your shiny ideal of who you’d like to be. And it’s especially hard when you are trying your hardest, but you’re still not able to live up to the expectations of other people and of yourself. I try to not cry in front of my kids, but while I was texting my older sister at the end of the day I let a few tears slip. My baby stared at my face, perplexed, and my nine year old brought me Kleenex, and besides feeling bad, I felt guilty that they were seeing me cry.

We went for a little walk in the dark, just my oldest and youngest and me. In the evenings this time of year, the South Carolina heat dims from a blazing heat to a bearable, moist warmth. Walking in the shadows of pine trees, listening to birds sing their goodnight songs, and bracing ourselves for the whoosh of cars going by, I thought the nearest thing to this September evening air might be the humid, eager breath of a toddler in your face, minus the lingering fragrance of goldfish or string cheese. And then, suddenly, my reverie was broken by the sight of a watermelon— our missing watermelon!!— lying wedged in the corner of our neighbor’s storm drain.

My mind flashed back to the moment we had arrived home after our grocery pickup, when I had pushed the button to open the rear door of the minivan. I had heard a thump. Not an unusual occurrence, given the slope of our driveway. And I had assumed the kids had carried in whatever had fallen out. But this watermelon had jumped out of the back of our minivan, rolled down the driveway, hung a right and rolled down the street (and across the street!) until it had lodged in the storm drain fifty feet away.

A car stopped by to see what we were looking at, thinking perhaps we had found her friend’s cat, and laughed with us over the runaway watermelon. My daughter gleefully jumped on the cracked melon until the rinds could be slipped into the storm drain. It was dazzlingly red— a perfect watermelon— and the fragrance of crushed, perfect watermelon perfumed the summer air around us. I think I enjoyed that watermelon, that untasted, wasted watermelon, more than any I’ve ever eaten.

We came back to the minivan and paused to fold up the baby’s stroller and put it in the back. A tiny gecko peered out at us. “Run, little gecko!” We said. “Run like the watermelon!”

The case had been cracked, and so had the watermelon, and a little sweetness had slipped back into my day.