Cantaloupes and Art
In high school I wrote a personal essay titled “The Nostalgia of Cantaloupe.” The essay, now long lost to the world, detailed the sweet nostalgia for childhood I got every time I ate a cantaloupe. My dad would by them from the local farm stand (grown organically by Geo at Hurricane Flats in South Royalton VT) and would carve them up in late August mornings for breakfast, or wrap thin slices in prosciutto to munch on before dinner. Sometimes if we had extra, he would make a “cantaloupe shake” (simply cantaloupe and milk) and my brothers and sister and I would slurp it down more quickly than it took to blend, and certainly much more quickly than it took to grow those cantaloupes. My dad taught is dead now (or rather, lives in the form of particles on earth) but he always taught me that making food is art, including nostalgia inducing cantaloupe shakes.
Many years later, today is the day I put my cantaloupe seedlings in the ground. I’ve been nurturing them since late April first under a humidity dome set up in the living room with the warmth of a heated pad. Cantaloupe are fussy and like warm soil conditions to germinate. Soon they moved into the pantry where I had moved aside containers of pasta and jars of grains to make room for them on a wire shelf, a long strip of grow lights attached by twist ties attached to the shelf above them. In May I would move them to the natural light in my kitchen windowsills, getting them used to the real sun for the first time. A few weeks later I started the process of hardening them for the outside world, giving them a few hours of time outside every day before finally building up to a full day and night. This is gardening. This is also art.
Today the plants will find their summer home in the garden patch behind my painting studio. I dug it last year, spending hours using a rented rototiller from Home Depot to clear out the grass. I plated borage, marigolds and cilantro to accompany the melons and to attract pollinator friends. At the end of the summer I was rewarded with nineteen big, perfect cantaloupe melons. Sweet enough to taste like the ones from my youth. My neighbor, undergoing chemo at the time, said they were the only thing that tasted good. He saved the seeds and is growing them in his garden as I type this. This is art.
For a long time I have worked to reconcile all the sides of my creative self: am I painter? A writer? A cook? A teacher? A healer? But my cantaloupe patch reminds me that all these things exist together as one. For that I am grateful.
