Look for the bee tracks
Because you might just find yourself following sweetness along the way.
We tasted the sweetest watermelon you ever did see on Saturday.
To be precise, thirteen of us tasted and devoured and gulped down the sweetest watermelon you ever did see on Saturday when my extended family holed up a cabin near the base of Mt. Hood to celebrate fifty years of marriage for the two that have long been the family glue.
My parents married in ‘76, after meeting at a liquor store in Marin County. My father, son of a Baptist preacher man, worked at the store; my mother, he recalls, walked in dressed in a short little number that showed off her legs. Grandpa married them in a backyard ceremony a good handful of months later, and just under three years later, I came along (followed by my brother, and then my sister). Soon after I was born, they moved from California to Oregon, where they still live today.
Decades later, each of us kids married and had kids of our own. We’ve all stayed on the West Coast, though none of us called Oregon home in the long run. Sometimes we’ve gotten together for holidays and some of us for a long weekend in the woods, but we’ve not been a family that all gathers together.
Because here’s the thing: you know how there are those families that get together, year after year, sometimes at the same spot, sometimes on the exact same weekend? From the outside looking in, the sameness of familiarity and consistency and togetherness (and maybe even a deep love of one another) seems to be the stuff that glues them together.
Maybe that’s why getting all of us together, under one roof, proved such a big deal: we really were together, like actually together, laughing and telling stories and tasting the sweetest watermelon you ever did see. 1
When my dad was showing my husband how to cut a watermelon — no, really — and my husband then stole mouthfuls of the fruit and declared it the best he’d ever had, a conversation naturally ensued.
Where is this from? Why’s it so good? How’d you know how to pick out such a perfect watermelon, anyway?
Someone yelled out that you should knock on a watermelon. The more hollow the sound, the better the fruit. The only problem, of course, is that to some of us, they all just sound the same. Like a big ol’ piece of fruit.
That’s when my mom piped up.
“You look for the bee tracks,” she said. “Bees follow the sweetness, so they know which fruits are best.”
My mom calls them bee tracks; some people call them bee stings. A quick search on the Internet calls this natural part of the pollination process “watermelon webbing.” According to Tasting Table, “When bees pollinate the watermelon plant’s flower, the resulting fruit later develops these web-like scars. The amount of webbing will increase the more a plant is pollinated,” making the fruit grow better and taste sweeter.
And it all happens when we humans take a moment to look for the bee tracks.
Now, I’m not going to read into this too much, but you’ve got to let me read into it a little tiny bit — you will let me hunker down on that idea of looking for the bee tracks and somehow then following sweetness.
We may not know how it’s going to work to gather thirteen people who haven’t all been together in a really long time together, but we give one another the benefit of the doubt. We look for the bee tracks anyway. We may not know how to navigate this Sandwich Generation of an existence — when we who are middle-aged find ourselves thick in the middle of caring for both our children and our parents — but we forge new ways forward and follow the sweetness anyway.
We show up. We drive long miles and we make the extra effort. We cook good meals, and we sit around the table, and we climb up mountains, and we say, “Remember when?” And sometimes, even sometimes, we realize that following the sweetness means letting go of the past and embracing the present and reaching toward the unknown future.
It’s not perfect, because none of us humans are, but we look for the bee tracks and follow the sweetness anyway.
With hope,
c.
PS: The boys and I made a road trip of the aforementioned trip and have been listening to a book that just might be the best kid road trip book ever written: The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart. Have you read it? Care to give it a read if not?
It was a Hermiston watermelon, of course.
I have to tell you about my pink bee. I was out walking the neighborhood, (sad because we said goodbye to our 11 yo rescue bunny) and I stopped to admire this bright pink vine flower. Right in the middle, a honey bee was completely covered in pink pollen! It was so astounding and so awesome. Just had to tell someone. Hope all is well for you. Linda Clare at The Deep End