The Mortality of Zucchini

Columns, short stories, and even novels have been published about zucchini and its place in garden-happy cultures. When Alan was in grad school at Penn State, we would have to lock our car in the parking lot while we attended Church. After three hours in the unshaded summer sun, our 1974 Toyota (obviously a vehicle owned by a family in need) would bake us and the children to a convective crisp on the way home, but we didn't dare leave the car unlocked or the windows rolled down, lest we find our car filled with zucchini, post-services. In case you've been living in a world without dirt for a while, all it takes to grow zucchini--lots and lots of zucchini--is a little dirt, a few seeds, some water, and some sun. I'm not really sure the water is absolutely necessary if the humidity is high enough. The trouble is that well-meaning co-religionists would try to supplement our diet with baseball-sized squash, probably found under giant leaves after the small, tender, foodworthy zucchini had been harvested. We appreciated the thought, but the bigger the squash, the tougher and seedier it had become, and we didn't have the heart to pass it on to some even hungrier family. So into the dumpster it went.

All this came to mind when I discovered some zucchini that had died in our fridge, fortunately enclosed in an easily disposable plastic bag. I had purchased it a week ago--and it galls me to buy zucchini when you can grow it so easily and in such abundance, but it is January. An "easy" zucchini soup recipe had tempted me while I was planning the week's meals and making a shopping list. I promptly acquired a case of bronchitis and some saving-yet-sickening antibiotics and was down for the count for days. Alan made the dinners, but the zucchini languished in the back of a produce drawer, and yesterday I buried it in the trash, mourning the loss of its tender, perfectly sized greenness to whatever attacks squash neglected to the point of abuse.

So at dinner I reported that we would not be having zucchini soup any time soon. Alan was astonished. "Zucchini can't die," he said.

We thought zucchini was forever. We thought it just kept growing until it resembled a pod from an old horror flick and had to be hauled away by a HazMat team, or a young family in an old car. But it turns out that zucchini is mortal.

Fortunately, the generosity of those who know what it's like to be struggling financially lasts forever. (Sometimes people brought us wonderful, homegrown tomatoes and tender, succulent, ready-to-steam zucchini.) Lately the neighbors seem to know what it's like not to be successful gardeners, even of squash. They bring us stuff from their gardens and we take around cleaned-out margarine tubs of raspberries from our berry patch. (We save up the tubs all year.) Sometimes we have to explain that we are not giving our neighbors a tub of margarine in lieu of produce from the garden, but it's always good to have a reason to chat about mortality and immortality or other, less important subjects.