There’s a poem I love from Diane Seuss’s book Four-Legged Girl, “An occasion is a rare occasion.” It’s a poem at odds with numbness, confronting a world (our world!) where "rhubarb leaves curling out of the dirt in spring are not an occasion.” So many moments are deemed unremarkable or routine, if they’re observed at all. Our requirements for what’s notable have run ahead of us—that’s the argument.
But this ho-humming of the everyday is an adult problem. It’s not true of childhood, when anything can become a delight. An acorn cap freshly separated from its shell. A caterpillar laboring across a leaf. A car ride to the grocery store. These are all bona fide occasions for little ones. And occasions they should be!
Watermelon Pool by Bonsoir Lune, translated from the Korean by Frances Cha (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2026) is a celebration of a summertime occasion that might seem ordinary to adults but that children know to be momentous—watermelon. It magnifies the experience of eating a watermelon to show how this small pleasure can define a season.
The book is less narrative-driven than wonder-driven. A gigantic watermelon cracks open in the heat. A grandfather leans his ladder against it and climbs in between the seeds. Word spreads, children come running, and a season ensues.
For all its whimsy and surrealism, the book is grounded in something very real: the cartoonish bigness of a good watermelon and the communal joy found in sharing it.
Summer’s almost over here in Wisconsin. They’ve pulled the buoys and boundary markers from the lakes. The community pool is closed. But Watermelon Pool has been the picture book of our summer—one we’re still savoring, and one we’ll be opening again next year.
From the department of one more delight
Watermelon Pool made me want to revisit Little Forest, a South Korean film featuring dishes as deliciously magical as a watermelon pool. Each meal in the film is an occasion, from steaming sujebi (hand-pulled noodle soup), baechu jeon (cabbage pancakes), and sirriteok (three-layered rice cake) to perilla pasta, fried acacia-flower fritters, and kongguksu (cold soy milk soup) to spicy tteokbokki and sweet chestnut preserves jarred under chandeliers of drying persimmons. It’s available in the U.S. on a few streaming services and is a contemplative and mouthwatering watch.
Until next week,
Tyler