No, this is not going to be a confessional of some long lost love.  It is more basic than even that.  My love affair is with the watermelon.

If I asked each of you what your favorite sweet or dessert was, I doubt many would consider the watermelon.  There would be a bunch who would pick fudge, a few for divinity, many would think a chocolate cake or the many variations of the cake.  Pie would garner a lot of votes, simply because we were born in a time when pies were regular desserts on our kitchen tables.  My mother had a 12″ pie pan and she made wonderful lemon and chocolate pies on a regular basis.  She never had to throw out any left over pie.  Cookies are good desserts if you are the kind who likes chocolate chips, walnuts or pecans and lately such things as M & M’s.  My favorite cookie is a simple Tea Cake.  No frills.  Just a glass of cold milk and a stack of Grandma’s tea cakes, fresh out of the oven.  Thats living high on the hog so to speak.  You can go fancy with mousses, brulees, and flans but you cant mess with mother nature and her greatest sweet invention, the watermelon.

I dont know who ate the first watermelon but I often wonder what they might have been thinking right before they ate it and right after they took the first bite.  I guess melons have been around since biblical times so they have had a chance to perfect them but I also wonder what the first watermelon tasted like.  We can buy watermelon pretty much year round and that is a good thing as far as I am concerned.  As a child I can remember family gatherings where there were several watermelons chilling in a washtub full of ice and water.  Everyone wanted the heart of the melon but only a few were so lucky.  Watermelons from our childhood had more seeds than the kind that are on the market now.  You couldnt even buy a melon now with the kind of seeds that would be required to have a melon seed spitting contest.  Poor children of the modern world. I eat my melons now as a part of a salad, a side dish that goes along with the blackeyed peas and cornbread or for dessert.  Sometimes, all three.  Dorothy likes to wait until after her meal and eats watermelon as a dessert.

I have a little confession to make.  If I had been the first person to have ever eaten a watermelon, well, you might not have ever gotten to taste one.  I just might not have told anyone how good they were and continued thru my life as the only person eating those big ole gourds.

Gary