June 2024 Flash Lit 4.1 - Watermelon

I have a story about watermelon, but the facts of it are not where the story lies, or why I remember it, or why it means anything.  What happened is that one fourth of July when I was about eight or nine, my family went to Tahoe with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and my cousins.  We spent the holiday at the beach, where they ran a sandcastle contest.  This was back before the real artists got into sand sculpture, so it was mostly a bunch of kids with plastic drugstore pails and shovels.  We worked all day, we five cousins, and built a complex we called Castle Crawdad, with real crawdads in lagoons around the structures—some of us poked around for a while among the rocks catching crawdads with bacon speared on an unfolded wire hanger.  At the end of the day, we won the prize:  a watermelon.

 

That’s the outline.

 

 But the day was magic.  It was hot sun on my thin brown back with my feet in the cold lake.  It was the coarse quality of the sand and the smell of coconut suntan lotion and grilling hamburgers.  It was sun glinting off the water and breeze in the pines.  It was the look of concentration on my cousin Doug’s face, my brother screwing around.  I’m sure my cousin David and I squabbled because we always did—we were the same age.  Robbie, my oldest cousin, tried to boss us, but then David and I united to crush him.  Of course the watermelon was the best we’d ever had, sweet with victory, cold despite the hot day.

 

The sun went down and we were wrapped in sandy towels to eat s’mores and watch fireworks.

 

So, yes, I love watermelon.