One Vegetable's Hidden Lessons

Who among us has never picked up a zucchini, held it in our hands, and wondered, "Why do I feel such crushing despair?"

Well, folks, now there's an answer. Consider:

Zucchini's Twenty Metaphors

When you think you have seen the last zucchini, a co-worker brings one to work, gleefully offering it to you, or a neighbor drops by with one in hand. In my work metaphors count, and so while I do not eat them I have found a use for zucchini. It is a metaphor.

GUILT is twenty ways like zucchini (though unlike the zucchini, guilt flourishes year round.)

1. People plant it whether they like it or not. Having it grown, and even flourish, is often more obligation than choice.
2. The yield is always more than expected.
3. People try giving it away, and to their great surprise others accept, often with a smile. It means they were taken by surprise, or that they would feel worse saying "no."
4. If they were just being polite, it becomes their's none the less.
5. Giving it away seems not to diminish one's own supply.
6. Having grown or accepted it, people try - usually without success - to disguise it.
7. The more they have, the more ways they try disguising it, pretending it is something else, something really good for you, and the more they try the more others recognize it for what it is.
8. No one wants to be seen throwing it away -- it was, after all, a gift, and it was supposed to be good for you.
9. Friends and neighbors are suspicious of those who have none.
10. They are more suspicious (though envious) of people who want none, and say so.
11. Trying to bury it, denying it was ever yours, causes more to grow.
12. If at first you liked it, it was not long before you had had enough.
13. It is never as good as you wished it might be, but you are not surprised.
14. Those who might accept a little, are always offered more.
15. Even when people have grown a crop of their own, they can seem open to the offer of someone else's - another instance of politeness gone astray.
16. It is not something where there are "fair shares." It is not equally distributed, and you can always seem to have much more than you felt you deserved.
17. Even when grown, packed, stored, or preserved by an expert, it is in the end still zucchini.
18. You do have choices about accepting it when offered. The first "no" - or "no, thank you" - may be the most difficult to say. After that, it is only practice.
19. It would be okay to grow instead a smaller crop.
20. Better still to plant something you might prefer.

[Published in the February/March 1999 issue of "Rural New England Magazine"]

Tell me: what other lessons can wayward vegetables teach us in these troubled times?