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Spring Melons
RICK KRIZMAN
“Got your buckets?” Mom asks and of course we do. Of
course we have our buckets, and catchers mitts, and a helmet for
Bitsy because of how she got her noggin popped last time.
She’s too little, I’d said then, but Marcy’d said You used to
be too little, but I said That was before.
We never go anywhere together, the five of us girls and Mom,
at least not since Dad’s gone. But it was him told us about the
spectacular sight, and of course he was right. Like how he’d
showed us the Mystery House where water runs uphill and if you
stood in one place I could be as tall as Janey, even though she’d
shot up two inches last year. Or when he took us to that hole in
the desert where the Big Bear threw down the giant snowball
from way out at the North Star, which Dad said was a pinhole
and the Universe was leaking out, but it’d be fine for now, we’d
all be dead anyway, which made Bitsy cry but she didn’t know
what for. Sometimes he’d hold his hand up in the sky and act
like he was moving a cloud across the sun, but I’m older and
knew it was a trick, that it was the sun doing the moving. But I
didn’t say, because of Cassie, who of course believed everything.
“Okay, hop in,” Mom says, sounding tired, like she doesn’t
want to do this. Of course she’s always tired, since Dad. Maybe
you just get tired eventually. I’m never tired and sometimes I
think whether the tiredness has been spread fairly.
We drive a long ways to the farm and Bitsy cries four whole
times, which Dad would say was a New World Record, which
always happened when he was around. Look, he’d say, three
rainbows, a New World Record, just for example. Or having the
hiccups for so long. Or eating the most ice cream.
We get to the melon field and pile out with our buckets and
baseball gloves, and look across the big heart-shaped leaves with
the tan cantaloupes peeking out under. Dad always said Get
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