Zucchini Redux

Rousseau once wrote “plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose,” meaning “I don’t understand why I have to be dragged into this crap.” Or something close to that. Or maybe it wasn’t Rousseau. Whatever. The point is we all have problems trying to make sense of what the hell is going on around us, both in the day-to-day and in the transcendent. Well, at least the day-to-day. My most recent confusion involves the profusion of zucchini in our garden. Not just zucchini. Giant, corpulent zucchini that apparently hide in waiting for days beneath the elephant-ear leaves of the mother plants before emerging one morning like alien spacecraft that landed in the garden in the silent dark of night. By the time they announce their presence, they are beyond edible vegetables, having become unwieldy zeppelins that would require a skip loader to harvest and a chain saw to slice. And I didn’t even plant them in the first place; they just appeared on their own, albeit from fruit (giant, unmovable fruit) that I had carelessly let go to seed last year, my le péché original. So I live with it. I walk to the garden and look down at the dark-green-turning-yellow leviathans. What am I going to do with them? I could chop them up and dump them in the compost pile. But that would spoil the possibility of them returning next year, of my cursing their monstrous progeny next summer, my questioning my own prowess as gardener and human being, my bitching in general about how screwed life is. No, I think I’ll just let them grow, rot, go to seed, and see what happens next year. More or less the way I deal with my own life.