Success - Don't Know if it's Sweet or Not

Last Saturday afternoon, my garden gave birth to 19 lb., 11 oz. 'Moon & Stars' watermelon - woo hoo!! I have tried for many years to successfully grow one of these melons, so named because the skin, a dark green, is spangled with varying sizes of yellow dots (stars) and the occasional large round yellow dot (moon). I guess it appeals to something childlike in me, or perhaps I'm jsut stubborn, but I became obsessed with growing one. Just one. It's never worked - I've tried starting them early indoors, direct seeding out in the garden, transplanting outdoors under a cloche - you name it, I tried it. And none of it worked. This year wasn't working either at first. I started the plants indoors in early April, put them out in late May - and then we had the coldest, wettest June and July on record. When the vines should have been developing, they just sat there. No flowers at all (I also tried to grow 2 heirloom varieties of musk melons; they just withered up and drowned), and to be honest, by the time August arrived with a near total drought (until the end of September, thank you very much) I had more or less forgotten 'Moon & Stars'. Then one day about the middle of August, I suddenly noticed that speckled vines (the leaves bear the same mottling as the skin) were spreading out far and wide! By September, seeing that there were only one or two flowers, I wrote the crop off, as it would never have enough growing season left to mature. And then, just after our trip to Canada mid-month, I just about fell over when I saw a big, round lump!! My God, I thought, I just may pull this off. I kept checking it daily, fussing over it like a mother hen, and when the time came for us to leave for a few days in Vermont, I dug up my floating row cover and tucked the damn thing in as if it was a newborn infant, for God's sake. But chilly weather was threatening, and I thought "I'll be bloody damned if I've nursed it this far (11.5 lbs. at that point), only to have it get toasted by an unexpected frost". So I left for Vermont, secure in the knowledge that my baby was safe in its swaddling. When I returned last Saturday, the beloved had nearly doubled in size, and with a freeze warning coming Sunday night, I decided that the time had come. In the house came 'Moon & Stars', the swaddling cloth was retired, and Baby Melon will meet its destiny following tomorrow night's dinner. Hopefully, success will be sweet!