“In early September I picked and cut open a small, soft, yellow-fleshed watermelon, and I was suddenly reminded of the pictures of small girls I used to see in a magazine for girls when I was a small girl myself: they were always at a birthday party, and the colors of their hair and of the clothes they wore and of the light in the room were all some variation of this shade, the golden shade of the watermelon that I had grown. I would wish then to be a girl like that, with hair like that, in a room like that—and the despair I felt then that such a thing would never be true is replaced now with the satisfaction that such a thing would never be true. Those were the most delicious melons I have ever grown.”

This is such a beautiful book. I first got wind of Kincaid in one of the introductory chapters of a book on ecocriticism, where she was introduced as “The New Yorker’s first anti-colonial gardener” or something to that effect.

Kincaid’s prose is so beautiful and flows so well, this book melding personal history and gardening together seamlessly. It meanders, leisurely and winding like a river. Will definitely read more or her narrative fictions.

Note: I started reading it more than six months ago, and I am leaving it DNF in spite of my massive enjoyment of it as an acknowledgement that the moment has now passed.