Memoir: A Memory of Watermelon

Even today the smell of watermelon will take me back to all those years when it was my first food of the day.

After my meditation and daily yoga routine, getting Lanai dressed and ready for the day, I juiced watermelon for breakfast. Whether we were living in the tent outside my parents’ house in South Jersey or living on the Island by the beach, juicing part of a watermelon was the first task. Drinking the juice always got my peristalsis working and then some pain yogurt finished off the early morning routine.

A few years earlier, before Lanai was born, I used to juice the rind. Drinking a quart of it made it so I would then eliminate three quarts of fluid over the following several hours.

I remember one night, staying with friends Bob and Donna, at their house by the bay. I juiced some fresh watermelon rinds to clean out my urinary tract. After drinking a quart of it, I went out for a walk. It was early evening in the fall, somewhat darkening up, a few stars already visible in the night sky.

The beach community neighborhood I walked through, I had been walking through for years. It was a weekday night so even the die-hard fall vacationers were long gone and most houses on the block stood empty and dark.

As the urge to pee became an insistent feeling, I would duck behind an empty house, squat in the gravel and stones most people used to keep weeds down, and give my water to the earth.

Several times I dashed behind a house, looking both ways before leaving the sidewalk. There were hardly any cars about so it was easy. I just didn’t want to meet one of the local cops cruising up and down the small town streets during one of my dashes.

So every time I cut a watermelon or am at a pot luck where someone has brought one already cut open, my stomach begins to rumble because it knows what’s coming and is getting ready. And interestingly enough, it’s rumbling as I write, a body memory come to light.

Jyoti