The sweltering summer heat made the front page in many state newspapers last week.

The news: It’s hot.

The same story was written in 2009, 2008, probably 1974 and even more likely in 1898. The fact that the heat index reached 105 in June in Mississippi is as much news as grass needs water to grow during a drought.

So it’s hot. Do one of the following — stay indoors and watch the electric meter spin in your head, or find a watermelon and a shade tree.

I never called them shade trees back home, and yes it got mighty, mighty hot in the outskirts of the big city. The heat never sustained like here, but the mercury will rise in New York as it will in the Delta.

We’d find regular trees, and the shade felt the same. The occasional breeze — God’s air conditioning that somehow the government has not yet successfully taxed — under a shade tree makes Mississippi tolerable this time of year.

As part of the Mississippi Acclimation Project, I now call them shade trees, which is fine with me. Sweeter still is sitting under a shade tree with a Smith County watermelon.

From the first day I stepped onto the Southern Miss campus until this morning, Smith County watermelons have been trumpeted as the best in the world. They sit alongside Vidalia onions and Delta catfish as the tops in their fields.

Local grocery stores make sure to label each melon with the Smith County seal of approval. The 32nd annual watermelon festival is set for July 23-24 in Mize — a town of about 300 in southwest Smith County.

The annual festival offers all the watermelon you can handle, music, a watermelon-eating contest and, yes, a seed-spitting contest.

Smith County melons have seeds, unlike the fancy melons advertised as seedless. Grapes need to be seedless, watermelons do not.

Especially those in Smith County.

Whatever authority granted Smith County as watermelon capital doesn’t matter much. Are they really better than every other watermelon? What about those in Jasper or Jones counties? Certainly their soil is not much different than Smith County.

But just as you don’t hear about Ferriday onions, there is only one kind of watermelon: A Smith County special — preferably under a shade tree on a beautiful, balmy Mississippi afternoon.

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Sean P. Murphy is web editor. He can be reached at smurphy@vicksburgpost.com