In the world of melons, you've basically got your cantaloupes, your honeydews and your watermelons. You can generally expect the cantaloupes to be on the smaller size, watermelons to be large and the honeydews somewhere in between. So, it can be very disconcerting when one day you order a cantaloupe from the supermarket, and it doesn't arrive the size of a cantaloupe. It doesn't arrive the size of a watermelon. It arrives the size of a Buick.

"Oh my gosh, look at the size of this cantaloupe," I exclaimed to my husband as I struggled to lift the ginormous piece of fruit out of the shopping bag.

"Are you sure that's not a watermelon?" he asked.

"No, it's definitely a cantaloupe," I said.

"Well, why did you order such a big one?" he asked. "It's just for the two of us."

"I didn't expect it to be so big. I had no idea I was ordering a mutant melon from outer space. It just showed up that way."

"It's going to go to waste," he said. "We'll never eat all that cantaloupe."

I shook my head. "Oh, we'll eat it," I said. "And we'll like it!" I insisted. I was not one to shy away from a challenge. I would not be bested by a piece of fruit. We had been gifted an ubermelon and we were going to eat the ubermelon if it killed us.

"It's going to take us a year to eat that," he said.

"Oh, don't go making melons out of molehills," I replied. "We'll just have a little at a time."

I was confident in this plan. But talking about eating a giant cantaloupe and actually eating a giant cantaloupe are two very different things. First, I had to cut it up, which took the better part of the morning. Then I had to find containers big enough to house mass amounts of cantaloupe. Then I had to make room in the fridge for an army of cantaloupe. By the time I was done with the whole cantaloupe prep, I was too tired to actually eat any.

So, I made my husband.

"Hey, what's for lunch?" he wondered.

"Cantaloupe," I said. "And then there's cantaloupe for dessert. But it's early. Do you want a snack to hold you over?"

"Sure," he said.

"Great," I replied. "Have some cantaloupe!"

"Hmmm..." he said. "I'm sensing a theme here."

"Then for dinner I thought I might make a cantaloupe salad and a cantaloupe gazpacho, and maybe a cantaloupe souffle," I told him.

"Is that all?" he said.

"How about some cantaloupe shish kebab?" I asked, holding up a piece of cantaloupe on a stick.

He waved me away. "I just can't... aloupe."

"You know," I said, "In the scheme of things, this cantaloupe isn't really that big."

"How do you figure?" he wondered.

"Well, I just read that there's a pumpkin in Minnesota that weighs 2,500 pounds. That's enough pumpkin pie for a small village."

"That's great, honey," he said. "After the villagers finish their pumpkin pie, invite them over here for some cantaloupe."

Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

Photo credit: Silkester at Pixabay