Sep 15, 2016 3 min read

When people ask, my answer is watermelon. You know the questions: If you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? What’s your favorite food? What food could you eat every day and not grow tired of?

For me, it’s watermelon. In the last few months my family has gone through no fewer than a dozen of them, always picked from the bin at the front of the produce department, and always seedless.

But this month we went one better than that. The farmer planted a few in the garden on the sunny side of our house. Each day when I went out to pick some basil for dinner, or a few tomatoes for lunch, I would check on the melons. They seemed to languish there for most of July and August, their vines stretching out around everything else but the fruit itself not really getting much larger. For a while there, we were thinking the zucchini might outgrow the melons.

And then, last week, it was time. I walked into the kitchen to find a melon in the sink. Somehow, through a rainy few days followed by some hot sunshine, it had grown to picking size.

We wiped off the dirt, sharpened the knife and sliced into our own bit of homegrown heaven.

What I found inside was shocking. The deep pink flesh was riddled with seeds. Big, black seeds the size of shirt buttons. They were thick and shiny and so numerous I hesitated even trying to cut around them.

“So this is what my childhood looked like,” I said. “I’d forgotten the seed part.”

We all have the memory. Mine was of sitting on my grandparents’ porch swing, holding a wedge of watermelon and spitting the seeds over the side railing. The seeds sailed far. No wonder. If they were as big as the ones I was now looking at, they were sturdy enough to be projectiles. Or to put an eye out. The farmer had planted the seeded variety, so he wasn’t surprised. But it was disturbing to find the pink flesh so pocked with black.

We’re spoiled, of course. The fruit at the grocery store must be pretty, shiny, unmarred by nature. So insistent on pretty produce are we that flavor is probably somewhere down the list. Most of the seedless watermelons we’ve enjoyed this summer have been delicious; the few pale, sour ones were not ripe, and I should have selected more carefully.

But when I cut into our own watermelon, I was met with a fragrance that took me back to that porch. And the flesh was sweeter than any I’ve had recently. Maybe that’s the result of the melon staying on the vine until ripe and then eaten within minutes – something that cannot be accomplished with a store-bought melon. Or maybe all those distracting seeds just mean better fruit. But once past the black bits, the rest was heaven.

Turns out that a seedless watermelon is the produce version of a mule, genetically bred and sterile. The little white “seeds” in seedless melons are actually seed coats. You can’t grow a melon from them.

I ate most of our melon standing over the kitchen sink, spitting out the seeds. There are two more almost-ripe ones waiting in the garden. I’m giving them another week, and then we slice into them, too. And this time, I will forgive the seeds.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.