The Friendship Melon

Every summer, cantaloupe season brings back a golden memory

I. Afterthought

Rural Extension Bulletin #732, University of East Utopia.

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To grow outstanding cantaloupe, you want:

1. Full sun;

2. Fertile, well-drained soil;

3. Music, preferably classical and orchestral (though need not be live);

4. Deep, infrequent watering;

5. Exclamations of delight when fruits begin to form. All the sweet melons appreciate exclamations of delight. Skip this step and you’ll taste the difference.¹

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To pick a delicious cantaloupe, you want:

1. Faith, because no one knows exactly the most flavorful time to pick each particular fruit;

2. Hands and a nose that know the language of melons;

3. Intention: If you plan to give it as a gift, the melon knows and smiles;

4. Technique: Lift the melon from the ground and give it a slight tug. If it comes easily off the vine, it may be ripe. In any case, eat it. You’ve done the deed.²

II. The Story

Cantaloupe season is ending in my valley. Every year, when the sweet melons ripen locally, I buy the freshest ones I can find, cut into them, and try not to compare them to the best cantaloupe I ever tasted.

My neighbor grew it in the tiny backyard garden where one summer I sat frequently, talking of cucumbers, compost, and apricots.

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I had just moved to town and knew no one.

I formed an early impression of the nearest neighbors when NPR’s Morning Edition lilted through their open window and into mine during the cool part of a midsummer morning. I felt relief and a little hope.

Two people lived there, a married couple about my age, give or take a bit.

After work, M— stood in the front yard watering a tree that must have been planted not many months before my arrival. A maple, I think. In one hand he held a cool drink; in the other, the hose. He had an enviable ability to stand still, waiting for the elixir in each hand to work its magic. His smile was friendly and approachable.

We exchanged the usual pleasantries: What do you do? Where do you come from?

When he finished watering the tree, he turned his hose on a patch of black-eyed Susans. There was plenty of time to talk.

I asked about the empty ground behind their yard and mine. Did he think I could plant some vegetables there? He thought I could.

I don’t remember meeting D—. It was like I had always known her.³ We could talk long about plants and books and color and soil and the dramas of life without any conversation actually beginning or ending. We fell into friendship like girls falling backward into snow to make angels.

As M— said, laughing, they were just as relieved as I was about the new neighbor.

Sitting together in the paradise of their back yard, shaded by the massive old apricot tree, we looked across their neat mounds of cucumber and zucchini vines to my forlorn little patch in the middle of a field not yet built over with apartments. My patch was small, as it had no water source nearer than my house. I could only grow what I was willing to lug water for.

Both of them were geologists, which explained why they understood soil so well. It rose up under their hands, catlike, and purred.

They made compost, turned it, forked it into the original clay. You could feel it underfoot as you walked between the vegetable mounds, how long they had been building up a soft, spongy topsoil to feed the garden that fed them, so they could pile their scraps and feed the soil again. And so on, and so on.

They shared their bounty with me all summer: yellow squash so tender you didn’t have to cook it, lettuce and radishes, tomatoes they planted a month before mine. Late in the season, the cantaloupe ripened. I had no idea how they knew it was ready.

I had never been a fan of any melons, but if I had to eat one, I would choose cantaloupe. I had no particular expectations.

We ate the first one together, cut into pieces in three bowls.

The next one D— handed me whole. I asked if we should eat it together. They had plenty, she said. This one was for me. Enjoy.

There can be no such thing as “plenty” of fruit like that. The first one tasted far better than I had ever known a melon could taste. This one deserved special treatment.

I took it home to eat right away, knowing it would never taste better than right now. A vision began to form.

Yogurt and blueberries I found in the fridge. I made the center slice and removed the seed-pulp. I spooned plain white yogurt into the hollowed center of the cantaloupe and added blueberries. I took my meal out to my yard, ringed with junipers.

I ate, ever so slowly.

Seven hundred-odd pages into Dante’s Divine Comedy, Beatrice turns to Dante and checks his understanding of where they are:⁴

“Do you not know you are in the skies

of Heaven itself? that all is holy here?

that all things spring from love in Paradise?”

When I finished the first half of the cantaloupe, I went back to the kitchen and prepared the second half in exactly the same way.

I returned to the green yard and ate the second half, exactly the same way.

Oh heaven.

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When planting season came around again, my neighbors did not plant.

They tidied, painted, and repaired. They updated their kitchen by hand, replacing the floor and cabinets. They gave away furniture and made their cozy mushroom of a house look spacious.

Promotions in their fields were not plentiful in our city. To move up, they would have to move away.

I too was looking for a new place after a year of renting next door to them. I had been job-hopping since graduate school already, and I was ready to put down deeper roots.

I moved from our little compound first. I signed closing papers across town, and they helped me lug my sparse furniture into a mid-century three-bedroom with a mature perennial garden and plenty of light. They gave me a hooked iron staff to plant in my yard for hanging bird-feeders and ornaments. At the end of a dusty day, they sat with me in my grass while tall evening primroses opened in the dusk, giving off a scent as fine and sweet as last September’s divine cantaloupe.

We had lived long enough to know that our precious year together was ending, and we needed to let it go.

I had room for visitors! They could come back any time!

We had lived long enough to know that if we never sat together in the summer twilight again, we already had a surfeit of what everybody hopes for.

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At the summer market, I pick up a cantaloupe and sniff the ends the way D— taught me. It smells sweet, so I buy it. Later, sliced into a bowl, it does not disappoint. The fruit is delicious. Almost as good — but not quite — as the best cantaloupe I ever tasted.

1. You may find proper instructions for growing cantaloupe here, from the Utah State University extension service.

2. Here is more authoritative advice about picking cantaloupe from an organic farmer in south central Idaho who grows smack in the way of the old Oregon Trail. Oh, how they’d have appreciated his family’s melons in 1846!

3. D— herself helped me with this lost memory: She brought banana bread to my door and introduced herself when I moved in. No wonder I felt her presence as a kindness from the start.

4. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, translated by John Ciardi (New American Library, 2003), Canto XXII, p. 788, lines 7-9.