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fruit. But this was no ordinary farm – it was a magical place. Here was where five-year-old Maria Fouraki fell in love for the very first time.
    Maria’s Babas worked hard for his crop. Bow-backed, a crucifix of sweat across his shoulders, he deposited seeds in carefully tilled holes. Babas was a large, round man, and the years of toiling in the relentless sun were written dark on his skin and silver in his hair.
    “Just a week is all it takes,” Babas explained to his daughter, his only child – a precious gift. “
Agapoula mou
,” he called her, “
peristeraki mou
.”
My little love, my little dove
. “Just a week,” Babas told Maria, “and the growing will begin.”
    Maria listened, her brown eyes wide, to Babas’s stories of germination and natural selection.
Only the strongest seed will survive
. She could not look away from the dark soil at her feet. She wanted the miracle to happen that minute. Babas, meanwhile, tilted his face to the sky, checking for subtle hints of the weather to come.
    “If God be good and the summer fine, we shall soon have a new family of watermelons right here.”
    During the days that followed, Maria thought of nothing but the seeds. Why could she not see them growing?
    “Be patient,” said Babas. “It’s all going on under the surface.”
    Maria imagined that the seeds were sleeping. Maria’s Mama would watch from the kitchen window as her daughter went to each of the hills of earth in turn, put her cheek to the soil and whispered, “Wake up, wake up,” in a voice no seed could refuse. When the strongest seedlings eventually burst free of their muddy blankets, Maria believed her soft words had made it happen. The melons would be her babies and she must look after them.
    The vines started creeping, spreading, and Maria helped Babas check each morning for darkling beetles, melon aphids and yellowstriped armyworms. After a rainfall she would prune away overhanging leaves to make sure no mildew set in. She ran down the gullies between the crops, continuing her bright words of encouragement. She placed small hands on the rounding balls of green melon flesh, feeling the warmth that they had soaked up from the insistent Greek sun. She imagined the fruits breathing, in and out, in and out. She tenderly instructed them to grow, to take up more space in this world.
    One morning Maria was helping Mama feed the chickens when she heard a curious noise. She looked up to see Babas working his way along the highest slope, reaching under the melon plants and creating a sound –
    thud thud
    The noise echoed around the yard. Maria felt her heart join in –
    thud thud
    She raced up the hill to where Babas was down on his knees in the soil. “What’s wrong?” she panted.
    “Listen carefully,
agapoula mou
.” He knocked soundly on the skin of one of the green fruit that rested, bloated, on the soil.
    Maria creased her forehead, the same way Babas did and the way his Babas had done before that. A pinched ‘w’ of skin – the Fourakis look of concern.
    “That sound,” said Babas with a smile. “You hear? That is just right.”
    “Just right?”
    “
Ta karpouzia ine etima
,” announced Babas, expecting Maria to share in his delight. “The watermelons, they’re ready.”
    “Ready for what?” Maria asked, her tiny hands clasped together as if in prayer.
    The melons were piled in a perfect pyramid on the back of Babas’s truck with no net or tarpaulin to hold them in place. Babas drove away at a snail’s pace, and would maintain that steady crawl all the way to Hania. Maria trailed the truck to the first junction, her eyes prickling with tears. She whispered more words of encouragement, this time urging one of her green children to topple from the truck. But Babas had done this journey many times before and was wise to the bumps in the road. The melons did not listen to Maria. The impossible structure of fruit stayed strong.
    Maria stood on that dusty path and watched the truck