Watermelon?

There used to be a garage in town; well, the building is still there but it’s closed and quiet. Everyone depended on being able to pull in and tell the mechanic that their car was making a “ker-chunk” noise every now and then or that the oil needed changing. He would nod and say, “Be with you in a few minutes” and you could sit down in an old metal lawn chair and page through a well-thumbed issue of some car magazine or other.

The garage used to have gas pumps in its heyday, but they’re long gone, leaving a small concrete pad with the ends of metal pipes sticking up a couple of inches out of the ground where the gas came up through the pumps. The metal roofed shelter that protected the pumps from the weather and drivers from the rain is still attached to the side of the building, but lately has been used as shade for something completely different.

A local man appears on Saturdays during the summer, his pickup truck loaded down with corn, tomatoes, cantaloupes, squash, peppers and watermelons.

He sits on the lowered tailgate of the truck under that shelter and vends his vegetables and fruits to all who pass. At some point during the day he samples his own wares and offers a piece of cantaloupe or watermelon to prospective customers.

For the past several weeks, I have been watching an orphan melon vine growing under the shelter. It came up through an opening in the concrete pad and I’m betting it’s a watermelon vine. I’m no good at identifying those things, but I can picture that man sitting on the tailgate, taking a bite from a red juicy watermelon and spitting the seeds out onto the ground.

The vine has grown and grown in spite of getting very little sun and it now has several blooms along the length of its tendrils. I count the blooms every morning when New Dog and I walk by and it appears to add one about every other day as it creeps slowly across the pavement.

The man with the pickup truck hasn’t made an appearance this summer and the owner of the garage building, if he checks on things at all, has made no move to pull up the vine. I hope it will be left alone to continue to grow and perhaps even to bear fruit. It’s a symbol of sorts, I think, of the activity that used to take place there.

Abandoned but not gone and not forgotten.