Shortly after 7, Saturday morning Pat Burwell was hoisting the second of two Gilmer brothers watermelons into the back of her husband”s pickup.
“One for us and one for the chickens,” she laughed.
Husband Brooke confirmed it from the other side of the truck.
“Our dog eats the rinds,” he added. “Loves them.”
Earlier in the week a friend told me about her mother feeding watermelon rinds to their horses.
“They get so excited,” she said.
You think anything that enjoys horse apples (bois d”arc or bodock balls, Osage oranges) ought to love watermelon rinds.
If you want to talk watermelon, there”s no better place in these parts than the north end of The Hitching Lot Farmers” Market on a Saturday morning. There during the month of July the Gilmer boys, Glenn and Johnny, along with Glenn”s wife Jennifer, her sister Amanda McConnell, helper Justin Canull and several active but well-behaved children do a brisk business in sunflowers and watermelon.
It”s a pleasure to watch this family in action. Everyone is pitching in; everyone seems to know what to do. Amanda is wearing a shirt that says Watermelon Mafia. Other T-shirts advertise Cherokee Melons, their business, so named for the road where their family home and farm are located.
Earlier in the week, I”d bought three melons from the Gilmers” mother, Malinda, who runs the stand near the intersection of Cherokee and Wolf roads.
By 7:45, the sunflowers were gone and the trailer that arrived with 300 or so melons is a lot lighter than it had been 45 minutes earlier.
The art of picking a ripe melon is just that, an art. Johnny gave me lesson. He patted a melon.
“Feel that vibration? That”s a ripe one,” he said.
If the melon has a dead sound and the rind feels thick, it means overripe. The color of the stem only indicates how long ago the melon was picked and is no indicator of sweetness. If there”s no light spot on the bottom, the melon may not have stayed in the field long enough.
This has been a tough year, Johnny said. A wet spring delayed planting until the first week of April; the long dry spell would have been disastrous had they not irrigated. As luck would have it, some of this year”s melons were planted on a field with a lake, and, for the first time, the Gilmers were able to water their crop.
By necessity, melon farmers are transient. Conventional wisdom is that you should wait seven years before planting another watermelon crop in a field.
Lee Ann Moore, who was cruising the market with husband Tango, let us in on some Delta watermelon lore. Lee Ann grew up in Belzoni, Tango in Scott.
“We weren”t allowed to eat watermelon before the Fourth of July,” she said.
The thought seemed to trigger in Lee Ann a stream of memories. There were the trips to the ice house in Belzoni into a freezing cold room where the watermelons and ice were stored.
“That big old door would slam behind us, and it was thrilling and scary once you were in there,” she said.
Her Lebanese grandfather was always watermelon master-of-ceremonies. Like in the old country, he would hit the melon with a knife and then tear it open with his hands.
“Afterward he would cut out teeth from the rind and wear them and scare all the grandchildren,” she said.
The grandchildren would then want their own teeth and grandfather, being a grandfather, would oblige them.
Tango remembers going to the ice house for melons in Greenwood after a day of work in the fields for Delta Pine and Land.
“It was the best thing,” he said.
Ezra Baker laughed as he remembered midnight watermelon forays with friends to the garden of a Miss Eliza Jane when he was growing up in Louisville. He said it was a once-per-summer thing.
I expect if she were still around, Miss Eliza Jane could call out the names of those young interlopers. She may have factored their visit into her planting calculations.
As I write this Saturday afternoon, two Gilmer melons and a sleeping cat share a wooden table under a river birch in the back yard. The watermelons are beautiful, their bright greens against the dark wood of the table; they are a good time waiting to happen. Nearby the flowers curl around themselves for protection from the midday sun.
No doubt, it is summer in Mississippi.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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