Those Years I Spent Growing Watermelons at Home - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

When I was little, I kept a snake. Normally, snakes don’t have feelings and don’t recognize an owner.
But my snake was a bit different; my snake could help me guard the watermelons.
My family had a two-hundred-mu watermelon farm. Ever since I could remember, I watched over the fields.
When I was tiny, my dad carried me while guarding the melons. As I grew older, he built a little melon shed for me on the south side.
He watched from the north, and I watched from the south.
The watermelons were round and plump, hidden beneath the green leaves. The two hundred mu of land stretched endlessly from south to north. On summer break nights, my dad could never sleep soundly; he’d pace back and forth along the fields.
I’d sit by the shed, playing. What fun was there in a watermelon field? Mostly snakes and voles. The voles ate the melons, and the snakes ate the voles.
Big snakes, small snakes, and mice scurried all over. Right next to my bed was a nest of snake eggs.
The nest had four eggs. I don’t know when they appeared; they were just there when I first noticed them. Later, I saw the first little snake hatch.
I poked it, and it groggily crawled into my palm and licked my hand.
I didn’t treat it as my son, but it seemed to regard me as its mom. I gave it water, and it drank. I gave it food, and it ate.
I put it in my pocket, and it didn’t try to escape. Then I just kept it in my pocket and raised it there.
During the day, I went with my dad to sell watermelons. In the dusty melon shed, I sat on the counter playing with the little snake.
Adults didn’t notice, or if they did they didn’t see clearly, or if they saw clearly they didn’t have time to bother; everyone was too busy.
Only the little snake wrapped around my wrist all day, sleeping in my palm. I’d rub its scales with my little hands, and if I squeezed too hard, it would shrink back into my sleeve and refuse to be pinched.
Selling watermelons took all day. At night, I’d hug the snake to sleep in the shed. When I was little, I envied other kids who had dolls to hug. When I grew up and bought dolls, I thought my childhood self was awesome for sleeping with a snake.
Life is a cycle: kids envy adults, and adults envy kids.
I think I was about six when I found the snake. At first, my dad didn’t know, but as the snake grew bigger and couldn’t fit in my sleeve anymore, my dad found out.
He thought it was a fake snake at first, just something I wrapped around my wrist for fun. But then my snake ate one of the chicks my dad raised.
Not only did it eat it, but it also brought back half for me. Half a chick was left in my bed.
My dad lifted the blanket and saw: first, me; second, the snake curled up asleep in my arms; third, half a chick at the foot of the bed.
My dad was probably so shocked that he actually put the blanket back down and thoughtfully tucked me in.
When I woke up, my dad calmly picked up a broom and said, “Damn it, you little brat! I told you not to raise a snake, told you not to sleep with it all day, and now your snake ate my chick! I’ll beat you to death today!”
I ran around holding my head and crying, and in the end my dad couldn’t catch me and gave up.
And so my snake was officially acknowledged and allowed to stay. I am Qiao Nan, and my snake is called Xiao Bei.
On summer nights in the watermelon field, the little snake followed me and my dad along the lush green fields as we chased away hedgehogs and caught voles.
When I went to sleep, it would skillfully climb onto the bed. It was cold-blooded, so it liked my arms-warm.
Back then, we didn’t even have electric fans in summer. I liked it wrapped around my wrist like a cold patch to cool me down.
Sometimes I’d wrap it around my forehead to sleep comfortably.