What could seed spitting
have to do with writing? When you look at society today, do you wonder if any
of the people under thirty years of age have ever spit watermelon seeds? What
about you? Are there mores preventing you from even trying?
I grew heritage Baby Bell
watermelons this year. Only five were allowed to grow so they could have the
best chance at development. When I harvested the first, I didn’t know what to
expect. Did I wait long enough for it to mature? No, but I was curious and
impatient.
Turns out, the second watermelon
was perfect. Because it’s a heritage variety, there’s a generational blessing
attached to it. Modern hybrids won’t produce the same variety year after year
and the quality suffers. Buy the seeds every spring, plant, tend, cultivate,
prune, and pick the fruit. Next year, do it again. Heritage plants produce
seeds which can reproduce the same variety, so I save those seeds for next
year’s planting. And four generations of plants later, I still get the same
luscious fruit.
This morning I harvested
the next to last melon. After slicing the end of it off, I cut a wide
cross-section to enjoy post-lawn mowing. Wow. What a lot of seeds. Almost
impossible to remove them from the fruit. When I grew up in the ‘60s,
watermelon spitting was a cherished art. Contests proved one’s worth. But the
skill developed through years of spitting enough seeds out of the way gave way to
enjoying the meat of the melon.
Nowadays, with seedless
melons, kids loose another opportunity to learn patience to get to the good
stuff. No spitting for them. Slice it, dice it, and shove it down their
throats. And they’ve applied the same actions to most of their lives. College?
All done. Now where’s my CEO salary. Discipline disappears.
When one needs to spit seeds, there are
certain natural laws to follow. Don’t chomp a piece bigger than you can chew
and separate the seeds inside your mouth. Watermelon is full of, well, water.
Have a napkin to wipe your face and for heaven’s sake, don’t slop it all over
your good clothes. And when you’re done, discard the rind out of the path of
travel, like in a garbage can, the pig sty, or over the fence. It’s the nuances
of seed spitting where one learns common sense, and patience. Patience is how we handle stumbling blocks.
It’s a learned skill. Watermelon eating is a basic exercise to learn. Many of
today’s young generations lost the opportunity.
Editing our work is a lot
like it. We write volumes in order to garner the good stuff, but we must be
willing to do the good work of separating and spitting out the seeds. A writing
mentor once told me a scene was too long, although well-written. We decided to
chop half of it. Her comment to me? “Don’t trash these good words. Save them
for another time.” Those things that don’t fit in this work, will be seeds for
future work. Processing, saving, storing, and replanting those seeds gives us a
future in writing.
Don’t delay, spit out
those word seeds and create a legacy for our next generation of readers.
