Mardi Link’s essay is a wonderful example of how narrating a story about a time you found something important to you allows you to weave themes of sadness and joy together into a full experience for the reader. The details in this essay, from the ones about the speaker’s sadness and lethargy following a divorce to the ones about boys at play and boys representing their family in a quest are vibrant and convincing. I believe as readers, we joyfully and energetically plough through this essay as revived by the words as the speaker was by the chance good luck she encountered.

The next two winners of the Winter 2009 contest will be published in Writing It Real over the next weeks. Each receives a half-hour consult with me, by phone or email, about a piece of writing or their publication questions.

****

The Legend of the White Zucchini
By Mardi Link

In the first warm days of that hard and hungry summer, green leaves the size of vulture wings began to appear in the pasture. A network of skin-colored veins ran through them and each was peppered with little spiked hairs all along their topsides. Then came their vines. Thick and stringy and the color of celery, the vines would grow a foot or more overnight, taking the flapping leaves with them as they snaked along the ground, powered by aging manure piles and the roots of their own mysterious and hidden cell factory. I didn’t discover these mutant plants, my sons did.

The divorce had me curled up in my chair, legs stiff as an old woman’s, most of the time and unless we needed supplies, I just watched the boys from the window. Through the screen door, I handed them sandwiches wrapped in squares of wax paper and Baggies full of apple slices. I watched them sword fighting with sticks and I could hear them laughing, all out of breath. I learned that a lowland jungle of leaves and vines had taken over the pasture on a day I heard one of my sons crying. A stick fight had escalated and bombs of some sort were called into service.

 “Mom!” came the sobbing holler from outside. It sounded like Will. “Luke squashed my head!”

The holler was followed by a boy, running toward the house, one hand pressed to the side of his blonde head, the other still gripping his stick sword. Dirty tears, freckles, no shirt.

I stepped outside for the first time in days and met him on the front porch. He dropped the stick at my feet and dropped himself into my arms.

“No heads!” he sputtered. “That’s the law!”

I felt a lump starting to form on the side of his head when I peeled away his sweaty hand. I looked down at his weapon and saw the end of it had been expertly sharpened. Probably with a pocketknife. Someone had wrapped the handle end of his stick in duct tape for a better grip. I touched the business end with the tip of my finger; it was so sharp, it could have speared fish.

“What’s this for?” I asked him, holding up the stick so the point was at eye level.

“For throwing,” he answered, looking me in the eye and crossing his arms tightly over his chest, “and jabbing.” Hard to argue with someone telling you the truth, even if they were only eight years old. My boys spent hours in the woods, building forts, watching squirrels, turning over logs and marveling at the insect worlds underneath. And, yes, whittling sticks into spears. They were for fantasy fights, and not supposed to be directed at any living thing, however. Will told me more about this real world conflict with his older brother. I figured out that he hadn’t yelled, “Luke squashed my head,” but rather, “Luke threw a squash at my head.”

The leaves and vines and manure piles in the pasture were conspiring together to create log-sized super squash the boys had each stockpiled in separate caches and were now heaving at each other like warring shot-putters. Heads, they had each agreed, were not legal targets. Luke was older by almost three years and, according to his younger brother, wasn’t following these rules of engagement.

My first thought, I’ll admit it, was not all that maternal. When I heard about two out of three of my beloved sons raining bombs down upon each other, the first thing that came into my head was not that one of them could have been badly hurt — the sharpened sticks were more dangerous by far than the squash bombs. Nor was I all that perturbed over Luke’s seeming lack of fair play. Will, I knew, looked like a cherub but had his own mercenary tendencies. No, my first thought was that the boys were wasting a potential food source. Their oldest brother was a teenager preoccupied with his summer job during the day, but he brought home an appetite equal to both of theirs at dinnertime.

Since the divorce, cash money had become as rare on the farm as a French manicure. Here we were, subsisting on eggs from our chickens and mulberry jam from our trees and day old bread from the bakery day after day, while the boys were having what amounted to a food fight out there in the pasture behind the barn. They might as well have been throwing armloads of rolled coins at each other.

I walked out behind the barn to their battlefield and looked at the pasture. I couldn’t believe it. In less than a month the field of humble grass that had been bit to the drying and brown quick by the grinding incisors of my hungry horses was covered in rambling green. Leaves and vines were everywhere, and hidden underneath were hundreds of log-shaped squashes with the heft and density of bowling balls.

“See?” Will said to me, satisfied. “Told ya. Bombs.”

Luke was thirty paces away in the far corner, crouched down next to his stash of munitions, a battered lacrosse stick rigged into a makeshift trebuchet at the ready. He even had it loaded, all set to let fly.

Over here at Will’s stronghold, the remains of shattered squashes were scattered at our feet. Seeds and ripened flesh and crescents of rinds were everywhere. I put my hands down under the leaves, felt around on the ground and wrestled two squash logs from their vines. With one under each arm, I carried them back to the house.

“Dinner.” I said.

Tonight we’d be having squash-crusted pizza. Tomorrow morning for breakfast, eggs Benedict with fried squash medallions in place of the Canadian bacon, and for lunch, squash bread with jam. I calculated the value in my head; my grocery bill just went down another notch.

The next day, Sunday, I made my weekly trip to Potter’s bakery.

Their bread is twice as good as store bought and less than half the price. It’s cheaper to buy it there than to purchase all of the ingredients and make it myself. If truth be told, theirs is better tasting, too. Even day-old.

On this particular visit, I saw an eye-catching sign on the counter. In green marker it read:

Enter to Win!
Potter’s Annual Biggest Zucchini Contest!
First Prize – $100
Second Prize – $50
Third Prize – $25

For the first time, I thought to wonder what the breed or species or ilk or genome the squash bombs in my pasture belong to. Were they, could they be, just maybe, a member of the lowly and oft-derided zucchini family? I tried to picture the mystery squash clearly in my mind, without the trappings of combat. I saw one, resting amongst its leafy canopy. It was the shape of zucchini but not the color. Instead of the ordinary rich green with white speckles, they were, like much in my life at the moment, backwards. Pale green fading almost to white, with darker green speckles. I also wondered how specific the head baker and assumed contest judge would be in his definition of the word “zucchini.”

I saw him in the back, kneading some dough. He had a little paunch around his middle, and black coarse hair with salt and pepper trimmings. White pants, white t-shirt, white apron, hairnet. His hairless arms looked like Popeye’s without the tattoo, veined and bulging, and he was focused on his work. What, I wondered, would this man think of my squashes?

“Excuse me,” I said to the old woman behind the counter with the cat-eye glasses, “could you tell me the rules for your zucchini contest?”

Birdlike, she cocked her head at me. “Rules? What do you mean, rules?”

“Oh you know, how many can I enter, when should I bring them in, what do you do with them after, stuff like that.”

She waved a bony claw in the air. “As many as you want! We make zucchini bread to sell! Friday, ok? You bring them in Friday.”

“And I can really win a hundred dollars?”

“Yes, we put one hundred dollars on a card for you to spend here.”

“Oh. You mean it’s not cash, but bread and rolls and stuff.”

“Yes! Yes! Or cakes! Or cookies! Lucky, lucky winner!”

I thought about it. I would have preferred the cash, but she was right. Someone, or rather three someone’s, were going to be lucky winners indeed. At eighty cents a loaf for their day-old homemade bread, first place would pay for a whole year’s worth for the boys and me. With enough winnings left over for a few cookies or even a coffee cake. A bag of bread in hand, I exited through the automatic door and practically ran to the car. I wanted to speak with my soldiers, A-SAP.

Once home, I explained the maneuver. Our plan was this: Will and Luke would each select the most worthy squash they could find to enter into the contest. From then until Friday morning, they would water them daily, pick off any bugs, and scare away the crows. They would not, I repeat, not, use their prize specimens for bombs.

“We’re on it,” Luke said, saluting sarcastically but still fully committed to the contest. If he can’t out war his little brother, he must have been thinking, he’d out grow him.

“Alright guys, these squashes are depending on you,” I told them. “They’re like your babies now.” Luke nodded. Will was still thinking about it.

“How about they’re like our prisoners?” he finally asked.

“Sure, ok, your prisoners. Just treat ’em good.”

That night, I was settled back in my chair. Movement outside in the near-dark caught my eye. Tiptoeing in their pajamas are two figures. It was Will and Luke. They each had something flapping in their hands.

I walked out onto the front porch and closed the screen door very, very quietly. I watched as the boys headed for the pasture and slipped, like the shadows of coyotes, behind the barn. In just a few minutes, they retraced their steps and ran back toward the house. I pressed myself flat against the wall by the front door and watched as they ran inside the house through the mudroom door. I wasn’t sure if they’d seen me or not, but I waited a few more minutes and heard them both run upstairs and jump into their beds. Their lights clicked off, and there was a lot of giggling, then finally quiet, then crickets.

Full dark came on just as quickly and I walked out to the pasture. There were lightening bugs twinkling above the vines like low-lying stars and in two spots on the ground the leaves of the squash plants were disturbed and flattened. I found Will’s adopted squash and nearby, Luke’s. Underneath each one was a plaid flannel pillowcase, folded in half. The prisoners, I saw, were completely safe.

For the next five days the boys cared well for their squashes and it showed. Each expanding oblong orb thrived under all of the special attention it had received and they were nearly doubled in length and girth. They had a green cast to them, but they were mostly white with a few remaining speckles. These were not whistling-Dixie, citified, green-horn squashes; these were full-scale, all-out, extreme down-a-country-lane squashes, to the max. Whether or not they were zucchini squashes was for Popeye the baker to decide. On Friday morning, he got his chance.

Wrapped in beach towels and riding on the boys’ laps is how the contestants arrived at the bakery. I’d told them about the possibility that our squashes might not be considered zucchini, and could be disqualified. They refused to consider this and we entered Potter’s single file. Will, grinning happily and straining under his burden, announced to no one in particular, “We got two giant zucchinis here!”

With a flourish that would make any magician proud, the boys whipped off the towels in unison. There was an intake of breath behind the counter and the three women customers considering the pastry case turned and stared. The bakery was silent, except for the sound of the industrial grade mixers coming from the back.

“Mike!” the old woman behind the counter yelled, not taking her eyes off the squashes. “Better come out!”

Popeye Mike appeared, wiping his hands on the front of his apron. He looked at me, then at the boys, then his black eyes came to rest on the two squashes. The boys held them up for inspection, turning them this way and that. The pale rind caught the light and they began to gleam. My sons were as serious as a slice of sourdough, waiting for a verdict.

“We’d like to enter both of these into your contest,” I told him. “We’re just not sure that they’re zucchinis.”

Popeye Mike came out from around the counter and knelt down in front of both of my sons and ran his hands over each of the squashes. He squinted, flicked them with his thumb and forefinger, and finally bent down and sniffed them.

“May I?” he asked Luke. Luke nodded his ascent and Popeye Mike used both hands and gripped my middle son’s squash and hefted it up into the light. He turned it first one way, then another, then handed it back to its owner. “May I?” he asked Will, who couldn’t hold his in his arms anymore but sat on the floor cross-legged with his squash in his lap. Will nodded too, and Popeye Mike repeated his inspection.

A long pause and then a verdict.

“Zucchini.” Popeye Mike had spoken.

“Yesssss!” Will said, making a fist.

“Who’s your daddy!” Luke shouted.

“These are the rarest of the rare, the white zucchini, and they only appear every seven years,” explained Popeye Mike, sneaking a wink at me. “They make a zucchini bread like no other.”

The old woman behind the counter looked down suspiciously over her cat-eye glasses at the scene below but smiled in spite of herself. The women shoppers forgot all about pastries and gathered around my sons, admiring their squashes. Popeye Mike was talking of zucchini muffins and zucchini donuts and even mulled the viability of chocolate frosted zucchini bars.

“Did we win?” I asked.

“Did you win! Did you win!” He stood up guffawing, and walked back to the counter. “Look!”

Displayed in a basket on top of the counter was our competition. A dozen or so dark green zucchinis no bigger than a submarine sandwich. Popeye Mike took each of our squashes and placed them on the counter next to the basket. They were bigger than their competitors combined. Popeye Mike held his paunch and laughed harder.

“You just won first and second place! Boys, why don’t you pick out a cookie while I settle up with your Ma.”

We are rich, I thought to myself, on the ride home.

On the seat next to me was a cinnamon coffee cake, a dozen dinner rolls, and two loaves of fresh, not day old, seven-grain bread. The boys were grinning in the back seat, their mouths filled with the sweetness of warm chocolate chip cookies.

Who needed money, anyway? Not us squash farmers. Not today.