A Gift, Restored

A Gift, Restored

It started out, as in all things in this present age, with a YouTube video. I was folding a pile of whites when my husband beckoned me over to his computer and said, “I’d like to do this one day.”

A woman was turning a watermelon into a cake, covering the chilled fruit with a scrim of icing and festooning the top with fresh berries and chocolate sprinkles.

Of course, this made us hungry for watermelon.

I said, “There’s some in the garden.”

“They’re probably not ready yet.”

“We could check.”

Salivating, we stared at the video and then got up and put on our shoes. My husband used the light on his phone to guide us across the wet yard, but the stars were so clear overhead that they shone like miniature beacons.

In the garden, we worked our way around the sprawling vines, touching the dark-green skin of the round sugar babies, the striped, oblong North Carolinas, the other varieties whose names we forgot to jot down on the pieces of wood wedged down into the soil next to the plants.

We selected the largest North Carolina. My husband twisted it off the vine and then dropped it. The fruit tumbled downhill, and we laughed like teenagers—carefree and intoxicated by the promise of a simple wish, fulfilled.

He gathered the watermelon again, and we trudged back up to the farmhouse. Everything dark and silent, our girls asleep.

We kicked off our muddy shoes at the door and walked into the kitchen. My husband withdrew a knife from the stand and sank it into the rind. It didn’t split with a satisfying pop.

Instead, the watermelon gradually broke open, and we could see the soft pink flesh stippled with black seeds. We smiled at each other as the sticky juice covered the countertop. I took half of the watermelon and used a spoon to eat the heart. He took a spoon and ate the heart out of his.

It wasn’t ripe. It was barely even sweet. But it didn’t matter. The magic wasn’t in the acquiring but in that moment. That togetherness. Each second, each minute, each hour was a gift that was almost stolen from us, and from our girls, and so cherished all the more for its sacred restoration.

Standing there, I recalled similar moments this summer: when my husband called me outside to help him chase night-crawlers for his trout fishing trip. How they shot across the ground like lightning when the flashlight beam landed on their slithering, silver-pink backs. How the mud clung to my boots and patterned the hem of my prairie skirt.

I recalled the night when we walked across the farm, and my husband showed me the projects he had accomplished: new barn boards, a chicken-butchering station, the raised beds of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries, the wall cut into the earth for our greenhouse, the wildflowers growing out of the pillow of moldering hay, and how their vibrant faces were turned up toward the waxing moon.

In the kitchen, my husband and I wiped the juice from our mouths, and I gathered the watermelon pieces and stacked them against my chest. I put on my shoes again, crossed the yard, and walked down to the chicken coop.

I opened the gate and set the watermelon in the run, a treat for my ornery chickens in the morning. And then I walked back up to the darkened farmhouse, where my two young daughters were sleeping and my husband would sleep soon, next to me.

My eyes brimmed with gratitude, and I prayed that I would hold each moment in my hands and in my heart, never forgetting, always remembering, that each second is a gift, restored, pouring through the hourglass of this blessed, fleeting life.

How about you? Have you had any moments this summer that made your heart stay still, trying to absorb the simple beauty of life?