Hill Country Living
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By Coulter Fussell
It’s the last few days of summer for Water Valley kids. The weeks of do-nothing freedom can be counted down in hours at this point. I can vividly remember these days from my own youth and the feelings of instant nostalgia for a summer I was still actually experiencing. The neighborhood kids and I engaged in an impassioned, bittersweet rush to have as much fun as possible in the last 72 hours of it all; a sweaty triathlon of bike riding, trampoline jumping and cold dill pickle eating.
By the time most of you all read this, the Water Valley kids would have already started their first couple of days of school which, in an interesting scheduling choice, coincide exactly with Watermelon Carnival.
Personally, I don’t care when school starts, but starting it on Watermelon Carnival is a level of intensity that is unusual for our slow-paced town. It’s feast or famine around here, I guess, when it comes to event planning. What would be ideal is if instead of changing when school started we changed when watermelons got ripe. Watermelons have no business reaching peak performance on the hottest weekend of the year, forcing us to have a festival honoring their heavenly greatness during a time with potentially fatal outside temperatures. I hate to criticize the most wonderful of fruits but I have to admit – it’s got bad timing.
In relation to timing, I was starting to get a little panicky a week or so ago when Main Street wasn’t decorated for Watermelon Carnival yet. It seems that GG’s Flowers and Gifts (which is located by the Pocket Park now) was one of the only stores that was Carnival-ready in terms of themed décor. I even questioned whether the carnival was happening at all for lack of watermelon crafts on display. Had, after all these years, interest in watermelons waned? Were people too depressed about politics or too hot to care?
This concern about the state of watermelon enthusiasm on Main Street had me asking my friends if artist Hannah McCormick was sick with Covid or something. I could only imagine that severe illness would stop her from painting our town red. Water Valley needed her vision and we need it stat!
Well, lo and behold, that very same morning I saw she had painted the bookstore! Whew! And then the next day, she covered Turnage Drugstore in what can only be described as a watermelon patch from a fever dream. I imagine one year she’ll paint a version of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” where Adam is reaching a finger toward a giant watermelon. Or maybe the God character is reaching toward a watermelon instead of Adam. Either way, the sentiment would work. And only Hannah could do it. She’s really good!
In a spontaneous happening, all the other stores, churches, dentist offices and homes were suddenly decorated for Watermelon Carnival – the circular watermelon-themed door hangers with bows, the watermelon pillows, the watermelon flags and the watermelon-red paper plate halves glued to paint sticks stuck in the ground and painted with small black seeds each of which bolster a small, single white line referencing the seed’s reflective quality. And all is well in Water Valley.
