When I was 13 or 14 years old, I took 2 girl friends from school out to the stable where I boarded my new horse. It was "Blue Circle Stables" outside of Beckley, West Virginia. We spent the morning grooming horses, then walked a mile and a half out the country road to a vegetable stand where we bought juices... drank them and decided to buy a huge, lovely watermelon.
Planning to eat it at the stable and share it with the horses, we started hiking back, taking turns carrying the melon. About half way to the stable, we were worn out and hurting. We didn't have a knife to cut up the melon and lighten the load... we were certainly not going to abandon it on the road, so we sat with it every few minutes resting. Then we walked onward trying to carry it between two of us at a time. More than 2 hours from when we left the horses, we struggled the last hundred yards, sweating, groaning and getting kind of grumpy with each other, now rolling the melon up the driveway with our feet.
It tasted good, if a bit warm... the horses loved getting chunks of it! I remember how sticky we got and how my 2 friends sort of drifted away from me after that. We had chosen the biggest watermelon they had. I thought later about how we could have taken 2 or 3 little ones... we could have had it cut into pieces before we left... the adults at the stand could have advised us, but, truly, I would not have learned such a good lesson if I hadn't suffered through it myself.
