The Exact Place You're In

In Canada, "summer" is a mysterious, whooshing blip. It's the kind of thing you think about with slow deference and longing, month upon month, and when it arrives, it rushes past, a fleeting devil on the wind.

The summer season in my Alberta hometown is seven to eight weeks of warm pink nights, fat mosquito bites, and blocked off construction roads. It is a festival every weekend and a sprinkler on the lawn. It is the smell of dust and sweat and deet. It is the smoke in your eyes from barbecues and weiner roasts.

I did not understand the appeal of watermelon at first. When I first tried watermelon, it was soggy. It tasted like swampy grass. The rind was slippery in my hands and the flesh bled all over my upper lip and dribbled down my eight-year-old chin. Most disconcerting were the black oval seeds, indecipherable from the beetles in my grandmother's front forest-yard. I had eaten a rainbow-sprinkles donut left out on a picnic table the summer before, and after spitting up fruit flies all afternoon, had sustained an irrational fear of eating bugs.

Watermelon wasn't the one for me, for a host of reasons. That particular watermelon was underripe, maybe even thawed from frozen, after travelling two or three thousand miles from California, or Ontario. There is a chance that watermelon came from China on a twelve hour flight or a weeklong journey by sea and road, although that is unlikely, because it had seeds. Seedless watermelons from China were all the rage in the 90's, back when I was eight and had no concept of any place beyond Alberta farmside highways and the funny-looking backdrops on TV.

My summer food, back then and there, was the strawberry.

Plump and already bite size, with soft-sweet outer cheeks, and sour-crisp hearts, you could grip them by their leafy little hats and chomp them to the scalp, or you could cut off the tops and pop them in your mouth like candy. My mom dipped them in dark, melted chocolate and placed them on a baking tray in the fridge. The chocolate would harden into a shell, upon which she would drizzle melted white chocolate in zig zags. The cold, chocolatey morsels would tickle my eyes first, then my fingers, then explode in my tastebuds. July-harvested, chocolate-dipped strawberries from my mother's fridge were better than cake, better than pie, better than anything you could buy and unwrap. And why wouldn't they be? Those berries were farmed and busheled and boxed just down the highway from my home. They grew wild under my grandmother's trees. They had their own festival in my town, celebrating the peak bliss of strawberry season with music, dancing and picnics.

I was a happy and studious kid. I tackled the dark and dreary Canadian winters with customary resilience, piling snow on the side of the driveway with my favorite shovel, hacking ice from the car windshield, playing pond hockey through the rosy-faced afternoon, and skidding down treacherous ski hills on inner tubes or "krazy karpets". It was in the summer, however, when I thrived, when the last school exams and dance recitals wrapped, when the lakes sparkled and the camper vans fired up, when the sun lingered in the sky past 10pm and left my skin freckled and brown. In the summer time, everything was brighter. Food had more flavor. Air had more life. My feet could be in water and sand and grass instead of socks.

In eighth grade, my friend took me on her family trip to Hawaii. We were wild and euphoric in the heat and swaying palms. We dove and floated and flipped in an Oahu lagoon until sunset. We cheered for Polynesian fire dancers and Samoan tree climbers. We ate charred rice and grilled meat, salted, buttery macadamia nuts, and pineapple by the handful. We marveled at the evening sky, its sun a golden coin, slipping away into a cosmic pinball slot in the blink of an eye. The air was thick with sea salt and flowers. Snow was a rumor here, a myth in the endless island warmth.

Fifteen years ago, I left home the way most kids do, scared and utterly uncertain, determined to learn and prove things, searching for the kind of belonging a mixed kid can't find in a small conservative town. I wanted to experiment with freedom and leap into the unexpected. I had run out of money and enthusiasm for college, so I convinced my boyfriend at the time to drive thirteen hours to the next province over.

In Vancouver, B.C., I discovered Pacific Northwest salmon, stonefruit and apple orchards, and the 5.99 bento box lunch special. I grew to love delicate Okanagan wines and earthy, exotic mushroom varieties. It turned out I had left the land of winter and the dream of endless summer for rain--nothing but rain. Day after day it rained, or at least clouded over with the promise of eventual downpour. I lasted three years, left my boyfriend after one. The sense of not-belonging only grew. I did not know who I was yet and the small, privileged arts community could not place me or invest in me. I found communion and friendship in the restaurant industry for a while, but the alcohol-soaked blackouts began to take a toll on my body and wallet. I wanted to stop trying to fit in and find people who were more like me. I wanted to travel and go on adventures.

I decided to skip town again, to leave Canada altogether.

It was in America, in my early 20's, that I began to understand the melon.

In back yards in North Texas, on porches in South Carolina, on the sidewalks of Harlem, on beaches in Florida, and here, where I now reside, in the desert air of Southern California's San Fernando Valley, I experienced watermelon the way it was meant to be experienced.

Summer in the Southern United States does not whoosh by. It stretches like taffy from May to October. It reddens your brow and sticks to your clothes. It heats every layer of skin. It sizzles through to your bones. It slows everything to a wet crawl.

I did not understand that summer could be like this, that the heat could be so long and blistering that I might beg for an air conditioned shopping mall or a cocktail in the shade. The sun had felt like home to me during Canadian summers and short trips to tropical islands. I didn't know the sun could feel like death, could roast even mosquitoes out of the air, could be unbearable after a mere hour in a Texas July.

It was there, in the feverish heat of summer in the American South, that watermelon became my singular, unfailing desire.

Dating back thousands of years to Africa and the Middle East, the watermelon is God's oasis in the desert. It is the answer to the hellscape that is summer in the southern hemisphere. One thick slice of ripe, local watermelon can contain over a cup of pink, honeyed water, and both the pips and rind are not only edible, but offer their own health benefits like fiber and magnesium.

I flew home to Los Angeles recently after several months of travelling in Europe. When the jet lag faded and my appetite began to normalize, all I could think of was goddamn watermelon. My feet carried me to the closest grocery store where I picked out a small one. I devoured it and bought another. On a proper grocery run at Trader Joe's, I bought a yellow watermelon, a four pack of sparkling watermelon juice, and watermelon jerky. My roommate had a massive watermelon, beet-red and thick-cut into triangles in a bowl in the fridge this morning. It was a sweet, hydrating marvel after twelve miles of cycling in 90 degree heat. As the days get hotter, the watermelons seem ever sweeter and more juicy, ever more necessary to my joy and survival.

This is how I came to know that the your favorite summer food depends on the exact place you're in when summer hits.

Strawberries aren't the same down south. It's a bit too hot to grow them locally and they are usually meaty and over-sour, or mushed and moldy from a long commute from elsewhere.

I am no longer eight, and could care less if I eat a bug. I live in a land of ever-increasing drought, where my productivity-obsessed mind forgets to hydrate itself. The sweet, purified water of the once maligned melon sets my thirst aright. Watermelon makes the hottest days bearable.

Watermelon, of all things, helps me remember that, despite the heat, I still love summer. I have chased summer all over the world, for its late night dinners and sunbaked bodies. But summer in the south can actually be long and slow. It doesn’t have to whoosh by. Where I’m from, the only long and slow season is… snow. In snow season, you can be sweaty and frostbitten by the same afternoon. Snow season starts before Halloween, peaks in February, stretches into April, and can occasionally drop in for a surprise visit mid-August. Spend your years in mostly snow, and you will chase summer for the rest of your life. Look no further than this incredible article on “Snowbirds," who become "Sunbirds" when they inevitably stop going back to Canada.

I have already been a kind of sunbird for 12 years. I thought I could travel until I found somewhere I fit in, but I understand now that fitting in is an illusion. You have to find what grounds you in the place where you're standing. You have to love each place for what it is.

And be open to a very different favorite berry.