The Magic of a Summer Morning

The magic of a summer morning doesn’t last long in Texas. Shooed away by mosquitoes, melted away by the rays, the magic disappears. But if I wake up early, I’ll catch that sliver of magic when petals yawn and stretch, when the cardinal chirps for his mate. That moment before the dew is gone, the sky is thin and pale and blue. The cicadas are still asleep. The magic lives in that moment before freshness vaporizes, while dreams are still new and on my mind. And it was at a moment of magic one morning that I noticed that a cantaloupe vine has sprung up among my petunias.

A sprout from a rogue seed left over from last season when husband-dear planted cantaloupes and watermelons in my beds. The seed escaped last summer. The seed resisted harvesting. The seed hid and hid all those many months. Ensconced in the dark, buried in the cold. Waiting. Waiting. Until now, unnoticed and undetected, the seed became a seedling. Tiny. Unobtrusive. Sneaking out of the soil under the skirt-cover of my purple petunias. My garden beds had a make-over this season transforming from vegetables to flowers. But this seed.  This cantaloupe seed endured the harrowing of the soil, the new flowers moving in and the new management take-over. 

Dew droplets line up along the edge of the cantaloupe's round leaf as though lining up for a can-can choreographed by a Broadway choreographer. The cantaloupe's deep-green leaf builds a canopy of shade in anticipation for the melon. The huge leaf gratefully gathers dew drops in preparation for the day's heat.  

It takes water and fortitude to survive the summers in Texas, as anyone who has lived through one will tell you.  I filled my back porch with greens and blooms earlier during the cooler spring months.  My back porch buds and I form an unspoken alliance as survivors of the day’s heat. We hydrate. We endure. And we meet again during the sliver of magic in the morning.