YOU MUST NOT CHILL
The first melons arrived at Midway Market sometime in late July. On my weekly visits to the place, I’d begin sniffing the store around Independence Day just in case we were about to enjoy an early melon year, but it never seemed to happen. The watermelons, of course, gave off no aroma but the cantaloupes did as soon as you opened the market door – that sweet, familiar stink of the muskmelon, emitted mostly from the naval. A full bin of them, newly picked, made my head swim, made me giddy with joy. I knew if the cantaloupes were in, the watermelons would be, too. And I’d start begging my mother for the 29 or 39 cents the Market charged for a fat Rattlesnake melon, or a dark green Peacock, the one with the deep red flesh and the tiny black seeds. I was in fifth grade when we moved on up the Geistown Pike to the part of town known as Richland Township. Midway Market was just a short bike ride from our house, the first home my parents ever owned.
Mother indulged my love of watermelon, my astonishing appetite for it. She boasted to friends that by the time I reached sixth grade, I would eat around twenty melons a summer. My father left it alone, complaining that it upset his stomach; and Mama might have one or two slices per melon, but no more. My sisters were long gone by then. So, the melons were mine. I’d eat two or three a week in the peak of their season. Seedless melons were not a thing yet. I did a lot of spitting, inventing little games I played alone to hone my accuracy.
Mother also indulged my reading habits, gradually buying every book in the Hardy Boys series and giving me an allowance to purchase comics off the rotating steel racks at Midway Market. Summers, for me, were a blur of hot, muggy days when I’d sit in the shade of our shagbark hickory, absorbed by the Flash or the Green Lantern while I downed slices of fresh, cool melon.
Cool. Not cold.
Watermelon should never be served from the fridge. Only idiots – I knew by age 10 – responded longingly to roadside signs advertising “Ice Cold Watermelon!” Refrigeration retards spoilage, to be sure, but melon needs to warm to just below room temperature for the flavors to emerge, for the crunchiness to be enjoyed without teeth frozen numb. Every true melon lover knows the best slice is the first – the one cut as soon as the melon makes it home. Nothing else ever crunches like that. Summer was the season of textures.
Take sweet corn. Most years it arrived at the market just a click ahead of the melons. A big cardboard bin in the middle of the floor virtually glowed with green. My dad was an old sweet corn man from southern Utah, and he taught me what to look for. You scanned the bin for thinner ears; the big fat ones everybody seemed to want were left too long on the stalk. It didn’t matter how fresh they were if the kernels had already begun to convert sugar to starch. You peeled each ear just a little to confirm: full rows of kernels on the cob – no jack-o-lantern effect – but small kernels, and gleaming with the opalescence of pearls. The color didn’t matter; the age of the ear did. Picking great corn for the table amounted to the worship of youth. If the corn was yellow, the yellow needed to be pale; if white, the brightness of enamel. I remember when the first wave of what is now called “bi-color” arrived. Then it was called butter-and-sugar corn, a far better name. But everything was better then; the poetry remained.
The poetry was mostly a matter of aroma. The comics, fresh in their narrow display tower, produced the newsstand smell. A friend of mine dubbed it “magazeeny.” You could stir it when you spun the rack, and there was no smell like it – cheap paper and ink. A load of fresh plums in the produce section gave off a sweetness as thick as plasma. It made you think your eyelids might stick together. My mother knew by aroma when the corn on the stove was done. There was no putting it on the grill then, no violent charring or any conceit of roasting in the husk. I cook corn today differently from how she did it, c. 1961: boiling in a big soup pot. I steam mine, gently, each ear nicely shucked, the stems cut close, all the silk threads torn away and left for the angels to weave new slippers. When you take the first bite, a loud crunch fills the inside of your head. The milky sweetness moves up into your eyes like light.
I was just a little boy then, but certain foods stained my palate for life. Sweet cherries and tiny apricots ripened on the tree; just-picked corn on the cob; every variety of melon; small summer apples with skin so thin as to be nearly transparent. These are fleeting things, born from the rising heat of summer. A few quick weeks and then gone.
Our farmers market in Walla Walla opened the first weekend of May, as always, with salad onions and asparagus, a few leafy greens, and lots of garden starts for the ambitious backyard farmers. Now it’s mid-July, and I went to market this morning, seeking peaches, berries, radishes, and the first potatoes and tomatoes. Everybody was there, raising their beautiful faces from the bins. A Persian cucumber winked at me. The tiny new potatoes, pink as an infant’s toes, begged to be steamed, buttered, and eaten. I won’t let them down. Tonight: baby back ribs, baby toe potatoes.
No melons yet, meaning the best is yet to come. The best of everything. So glad to be alive. So very lucky!