Honeydew and Tomato Don’t

A Belle Perdue account

Betty Anne didn’t mean to start anything.

A few years back she threw a honeydew at the back fence. It had gone soft in the middle, and she figured the ants would take care of it quicker than the garbage man would. So she stepped out the back door, took aim like a woman who had thrown plenty of things over that fence in her time, and let it fly.

It hit the boards with a soft thud and slid down into the dirt.

Betty Anne went back inside and forgot about it.

Come the next summer she noticed a whole knot of vines climbing up that same fence. Big broad leaves, curling tendrils, the kind of enthusiasm plants sometimes get when nobody’s watching them too closely.

Betty Anne isn’t one to fuss over much, so she let it be. Figured it would sort itself out one way or another, the way most things do if you leave them alone long enough.

By the end of summer she had a whole slew of honeydews hanging off that fence like green lanterns.

“Well now,” she said, standing there with her hands on her hips.

She could eat one or two, sure enough. But if she let the rest rot out there, they’d seed the yard and next year she might wake up to honeydews trying to climb the porch steps.

So she called Darryl.

Darryl was standing at the grocery buying his usual pack of cinnamon toothpicks when he mentioned Betty Anne’s situation. Before he’d even finished the sentence, people in line started speaking up.

“I’ll take one.”

“Me too.”

“Long as it ain’t one of those mushy ones.”

“Betty Anne grew those?”

“Well I’ll be.”

By the time Darryl reached Betty Anne’s place there wasn’t much left to discuss.

“I’ll just haul these over to the grocery,” he told her. “Everybody’s already waiting.”

Then he looked up at the vine curling along the fence.

“By the by, Betty Anne… how’d you get a honeydew fence anyway?”

Now Betty Anne doesn’t venture out much. She’s what folks politely call a homebody. Which only made everyone more curious about how she’d managed to grow a whole fence full of melons without leaving the yard.

Before long people started coming by in the fall just to see it.

And because Belle Perdue is the sort of town that can turn nearly anything into a tradition if you give it half a chance, somebody suggested drawing sticks to decide who’d pitch the next honeydew at the fence for the following year’s crop.

Betty Anne hadn’t really meant for any of that to happen.

But every fall now folks gather in her yard, laugh a bit, draw sticks, and somebody winds up throwing the melon.

Which brings us to this spring.

Betty Anne is standing at the kitchen window eyeing that fence again. Something green is creeping up the boards, though it’s far too early for honeydew vines.

She narrows her eyes at it for a long moment.

Then she remembers.

“Oh lord,” she says to the empty kitchen.

Last fall, near the end of tomato season, one of her tomatoes had gone bad clear through. Soft as pudding and smelling worse.

Without thinking too much about it she’d tossed it at the same old fence.

Betty Anne takes another look out the window.

Now she’s trying to decide whether she’s accidentally started herself a whole new ritual…

or whether she ought to venture out there and pull that vine up before the town finds out about it.

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