The story behind The Watermelon Garden

When I was a boy, somebody told me a story on a porch.

It was the slow heat of August — the kind of Southeastern North Carolina afternoon where the watermelons come ripe and the dog lies flat as a rug because it’s too hot to do anything else. I don’t remember every word. I remember the shape of it: a boy, a garden, and a grandfather’s warning about a patch of melons that came up on their own. You leave those be. They are not for us. And the boy, being a boy, not leaving them be.

Inside the forbidden melon, instead of a sweet red heart, there was a small blue world that turned all on its own in his hand. Oceans on it. Clouds drifting and curling. The whole wide world, small enough to hold.

I never forgot it. For years I couldn’t tell you why.

I think now it’s because it never tells you what to do. It just sets something impossibly precious in your hands and asks, quietly, whether you’ll be careful with it. There’s no moral stapled to the end. The story loops back to the warning beginning again, and never shows you whether the boy listens — so you carry the “well… if he had just listened…” into your own life. That felt truer than spelling it out.

Why I finally wrote it down

I have kids. And the porch where stories like this got told — the slow afternoons, the people who told them — is exactly the kind of thing that disappears if nobody writes it down.

So I wrote it down. I illustrated it. And I turned it into a real book you can hold: The Watermelon Garden.

This is what [Old Family Recipe](/) has always been about for me — not just the recipes, but the things a family passes down at the table and on the porch. The stories are recipes too. So it felt right to give the books a little corner here.

Get the book

You can get The Watermelon Garden on Amazon — a full-color paperback ($14.99) made to be read aloud and handed down, or the Kindle edition ($4.99) to read anywhere. It's also on our books page, alongside the rest of the little press.

— Andy