Your Watermelon

On saying yes to joy sometimes.

Would you like to buy this print? There are ten prints (and that’s it, forever) available for $10 each (including shipping). Each 5x5” print is numbered and signed, and comes with some fun surprise goodies. (This is a good present for a friend having a hard time — & I’ll write a note for your person, if you tell me what to write.) Here’s that link again....

Dear Friend, 

What’s your opinion about watermelon?

Actually, I am curious enough about this that I am going to place a poll RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, and you can weigh in on your watermelopinion.

Honestly, in a vacuum, I don’t really like watermelon all that much. I mean, if I’m just sitting in this vacuum, devoid of context, at a neutral temperature and with no one around, and a robotic hand is placing foods into my mouth and having me rank them, one to ten, I would probably give watermelon about a five. The pros of watermelon are: they’re sweet, they’re juicy, they’re pink, they smell fresh, they’re easy to cut. The cons are: after one piece, they start to be TOO sweet; they’re sticky; they are a melon, which I like in theory but not in practice; and they’re really too big to eat alone. 

I guess that last point could be a pro, too. Not if you’re in a vacuum, but in real life, with all its contexts. 

If you definitely hate watermelon, and you’ve already read this far, (1) thank you, and (2) I’ll tell you right now that watermelon is actually sort of a metaphor — or more accurately, a word that I’m using to mean something else. You know how sometimes you can read about God and if you swap the word God for something else (humanity, love, The Great Mystery) the reading works better for you? (Or vice versa: maybe you read “love” and the word “God” works better.) “Watermelon,” for the next 2,128 words, will mean watermelon, but it will also mean God. At least, a kind of God. Insofar as God also means, as it certainly sometimes does, the impossible but undeniable existence of joy. 

By the way, if you have been reading thusfar BECAUSE OF watermelon — I mean, if you’re a person who reveres watermelon and hoped that this newsletter would provide you more information about a fruit that you already appreciate, I offer you the following fun facts about watermelon. (Apparently, btw, Watermelon Day was August 3. So… next year we’ll be more topical.)

I used to subscribe to the magazine VegNews¹ Magazine, and one month, they asked all the contributors to say what their favorite vegan summer treat was. ALL OF THEM said “watermelon.” At first I was dubious, but when I thought about it, “watermelon” is a sensible answer. A watermelon is simple, accessible, cheap. A watermelon is complete, and without any intervention, it’s the food you want it to be, especially in the summer.

(As a practical aside, if you did want an intervention for a watermelon, an ex-boyfriend of mine once picked cups of mint from our backyard and threw them in a blender with the meat of half a cold watermelon and blended it all up and we drank it and it did seem kind of magical that you didn’t have to add any water or anything to make a juice that was so juicy and so summer-appropriate. This is an agua fresca. If you’ve never made one, I urge you to do so.)

My summer (and maybe yours too) has felt busy. The weather has been lovely, and I’ve felt lucky to swim in the lake and to see the people I hoped to see. But still, days have been jam-packed with things needing to get done, and sleep has felt more often like a comma than a period. (Does this make sense? Like, sleep doesn’t feel like the end of a day. It feels like biologically necessary bodily rest in the middle of an eternal day that never really ends.) Sometimes, my husband Luke is busy being at work or going out to the hardware store or cleaning rat poop out of the garage (thank you, Luke), and I am tasked with watching my nine-month-old daughter, T. I have a default activity, and if you are a longtime reader, you already know what it is: I sit in my backyard with the (now completely filthy) inflatable unicorn pool I bought from Marshall’s in June; I take all T’s clothes off and put her in the empty pool; then, I turn on the hose and slowly fill the pool while she sits, mesmerized by the flow of the water and the way it lifts her weird brain-shaped bath toy up up up. (She also eats garden tomatoes and string beans and kale leafs in there, and she also splashes.)

brain-shaped toy not pictured.

Are you familiar with EMDR? It stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and it’s a psychological practice originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. I’ve had two therapists work through it with me, and both times I found it a little kooky, but definitely useful. One thing that helps with EMDR is if you have a perfect place to go to in your mind. The first time I did it, ten years ago, I imagined an open field with singing birds, shady trees (amazing, given the openness of the field), and a cool, canopied bed. Three years ago, when I tried again, the best place I could think of was my actual backyard, in the summer, with the chickens wandering around, music playing softly, and a gentle breeze. I felt really lucky that my fantasy place existed in real life and that for three months every year, I could go to it. (PS - What is your in-your-head place? If you don’t have one, you can build one RIGHT NOW. Go for it! I’ll wait for you!)

Our backyard, back then. Norman.

However, the subsequent few summers, there were problems in my backyard. The chickens ripped up all the verdure. Rats took over and ate the tomatoes. (And they laughed about it, and mocked me.) Yellow jacket hives moved in and swarmed the beehive boxes and killed all the bees and ate all the honey. Lessons were learned, but summers also disappeared. This has been the first summer since the first year we lived in this house that the backyard has felt good again. The trial and error has been worth it, though: knowing that the blissfulness of the space could be taken away has made it feel even better than before. Plus, now I have T, and I have this dirty unicorn pool. 11/10. 

I didn’t mention this before, but the fantasy-image of my backyard involved watermelons. This is because chickens LOVE watermelons, and I had one serene afternoon several years ago where I cut one up and shared it with the chickens, and the chickens loped about and grazed the melons, and they made cute little melon-eating noises, and they were peaceful because they were eating and there was enough to go around. (Sometimes chickens are mean to each other.)

Bird Reynolds on that day. Peaceful.

So one day last week, remembering the watermelon element, I bought a small watermelon at the grocery store; and that evening (the weather happened to be Peak Summer), I brought a big yellow knife outside, and I cut the watermelon up for me and T (and Scratch the chicken, WHO IS MY FAVORITE ONE). T ate hers in the pool, and she mostly sucked on it, which is maybe an even cuter sound than chicken-watermelon-sound. I put on this generic summer playlist and stuck my phone under my chair so it wouldn’t distract me, plopped my feet in the “pool,” and made eye contact with my daughter while we ate watermelon.

AND OH, THERE IT WAS! The feeling of perfect alignment, of deep rest, of strangling love, of explosive nowness. Do you recognize it? The moment is so complete that you cry, because knowing you are INSIDE of exactly the thing that life is about is sort of heartbreaking, since it is necessarily short, and rare, and fleeting. All you want is to hold on, but you can’t. If you think about it too hard, this feels cruel. But if you don’t think about it, if you just ARE it, that feeling exceeds the feeling of joy. That feeling is watermelon. 

I can’t be sure what exactly does it for you the way watermelon does it for me, but if you can bring yourself to know what it is, it’s a good thing to have in your personal glossary. That way, when it comes up, you can say, “Oh, here it is. Just be here now." Be inside every breath. What do you smell? Hear? Taste? See? Move through this moment with the knowledge that it is precious and that it deserves your full attention.

And more than that: if you notice your watermelon when it comes, you can say yes to watermelon in the future.

Like, for instance: a few days after Pool Watermelon Time, my friend Diana and I planned to take a walk. I arrived outside her apartment a little early, and I lay on the ground and looked up at the flowers and the sky. It looked like this:

Diana texted asking if I wanted some watermelon. Friend, I very nearly said no. I very nearly said, “Oh, that’s OK, thank you for offering, though!” Because we had planned on going on a walk, and not on eating watermelon, and it would probably put her through trouble to cut me a piece of watermelon and bring it all the way down to me. But I was already edging into joy, just staring at those yellow flowers, so instead I said:

Do you know what I happened to be lying beside? A bush-sized crop of mint. (It’s kind of a weed in Chicago, but it also deters pests, because they don’t like how it smells.) So Diana came down, with watermelon, and we put mint from the ample mint-bush on our watermelon slices:

And then there it was again! The watermelon feeling. I felt grateful to Diana for furnishing and ushering this moment of exquisite joy, that I got to hold in my mouth, against my teeth, on my tongue, for the duration of a slice of watermelon, which turns out to be exactly the right amount of time to have feelings so big and so gorgeous. 

A lot of people don’t feel powerful or joyful or alive in summer heat, and for them (is this you?) the cold snap of fall can hold a watermelon moment. If you love how it feels to need a sweater or to benefit from hot tea, scour the weather reports in the coming months, so you can say yes to that feeling more deliberately. If you are a person whose watermelon is the first cookie out of the oven on a snow day, know that about yourself, and choose to say yes to that moment, too.

I didn’t realize until recently how powerful it is to say yes to watermelon. I can’t imagine you’ll ever regret it. 

Love, 

Sophie

Parenting Paragraph

T has started getting into some very dangerous games in the bathtub. The way you bathe a child changes so much every week; I don’t think I realized this. We have given T a bath almost every day since she was two days old, because, as I have repeatedly written here, she LOVES WATER. It reliably cheers her up, which is something that helps ease into the difficult loneliness of going to bed. (I also struggle with this, and would love to have a bath every night, so I will let her take one for as long as she wants to, and the earth says it’s OK.) When she was brand new, we put barely-warm water in the little baby tub and held her in there. I took most baths WITH her, because she seemed to love to float. She used to swim around the bathtub with an Otteroo floatie around her neck, and she loved that. Then she outgrew it, and I started letting her sit in a chair in the bathtub while I took a shower, so the water could really get on her face. Eventually, we traded everything for a big rubber mat that rests in the tub and gathers mold. She used to just sit on it and splash and play with her toys. Now she has to crawl around, and try to stand up and pee, and grab all the bottles of the edge, and bonk her head on this or that thing, and stick her whole face under the running water from the faucet. I feel she is very alive in these moments, and I enjoy them, even as I am terrified, still, that she will drown. (Even though she has now been totally submerged in water many, many times, and has always been able to figure it out. A water related thing has never even made her cry. And I’ve never believed in horoscopes, except that it is true that she has her sun and moon in Scorpio, a water sign, so.)

Here’s What Paid Subscribers Are Getting

(If you already pay for your subscription: THANK YOU. Dismissed.) There are some real benefits to a paid subscription! This week, paid subscribers submitted their favorite recipes, and I am working hard turning it in to a recipe ‘zine that I will print and mail to any paid subscriber who wants one! We also have a (really pretty incredibly amazing) summer playlist generated by readers (and myself!), and we are starting a book club that will meet in late September to discuss Emily Nagoski’s “Come As You Are” (which is really, really good). Also, if you want to see pictures of my actual daughter, my actual husband, and learn the more intimate details of our actual lives, paid subscribers get personal photos (where I call my daughter by her actual name), and stories. You will also get five more suggestions of things to watch, do, and see per week, and also, you and I will form a REAL BOND. (Probably. This has happened with many paid subscribers so far, and it is mutually beneficial, I hope.) So please support independent writing and join a paid tier! All you have to do is not order take-out ONE TIME, and you’ve paid for three months of writing.

1. I mostly don’t continue to subscribe because I find their Wellness Issues every January to be both classist and laughable. Like, “The future of Wellness is a $10,000 mirror you put in your living room where a vegan robot can tell you how to do ab workouts.” That kind of thing.