188 animal, vegetable, miracle
was raised by frugal parents who themselves grew up in the Depression,
when starvation seemed a genuine possibility. I have now, as a grown- up,
learned to buy new jeans when mine have patches on the patches, but I
have not learned to throw perfectly good food in the garbage. Not even
into the compost, unless it has truly gone bad. To me it feels like throwing
away a Rolex watch or something. (I’m just guessing on that.) Food was
grown by the sweat of someone’s brow. It started life as a seed or newborn
and beat all the odds. It’s intrinsically the most precious product in our
lives, from an animal point of view.
But there sat this pile on the kitchen counter, with its relatives jammed
into a basket in the mudroom—afloat between garden and kitchen—just
waiting for word so they could come in here too: the Boat Zucchinis.
Sometimes I just had to put down my knives and admire their extrava-
gant success. Their hulking, elongated cleverness. Their heft. I tried bal-
ancing them on their heads, on their sides: right here in the kitchen we
had the beginnings of our own vegetable Stonehenge. Okay, yes, I was los-
ing it. I could not stay ahead of this race. If they got a little moldy, then I
could compost them. And the really overgrown ones we were cracking
open for the chickens to eat—that isn’t waste, that’s eggs and meat. A hog
could really do that for us in spades....
Could they design an automobile engine that runs on zucchini?
It didn’t help that other people were trying to give them to us. One day
we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging
on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight.
“Wow,” we all said—“what a good idea!”
Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people
lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the
front seat. I used to think that was a joke.
I don’t want to advertise the presence or absence of security measures
in our neighborhood, except to say that in rural areas, generally speaking,
people don’t lock their doors all that much. The notion of a “gated com-
munity” is comprehensible to us only in terms of keeping the livestock
out of the crops. It’s a relaxed atmosphere in our little town, plus our
neighbors keep an eye out and will, if asked, tell us the make and model
of every vehicle that ever enters the lane to our farm. So the family was a