A cold watermelon on a hot summer day is a glorious treat, especially when eaten outside where seed spitting is allowed.

Francis and Janet Hall eating watermelon, 1921

Whoever invented watermelon pickles must have had the bright idea to preserve the memory of this sweet, watery, cold, pink, and green fruit for a dark winter day.

My uncle Francis loved these pickles, so my grandmother kept jars of them in the basement and put the sweet sticky blobs in a glass dish to go along with the big Sunday dinner. But watermelon pickles are a disappointment. They don’t look like watermelon because they’re actually watermelon RIND pickles. And during the pickling process they become translucent and kind of slimy. I think someone should figure out a way to make watermelon pickles so they look like the ones my grandson and I painted on a recent July afternoon.

“Watermelon Pickles,” Carol and Henry, 2014

On Monday:  Ellsworth’s Room