Reflections on the Fifth Week of Summer – Zucchini Samaritan

    After Spence made zucchini cakes, zucchini burritos, zucchini sauté, and stir fried zucchini, he called Kathy. “Would you and Tom like some zucchini?”

    She groaned. “I just bought some at the store.”

    “Don't buy any more. We'll give you all you need, and, if you have extras, you can pass them on to friends.”

    “Oh, we'll use them,” Kathy said, “and I was going to call you anyway. Tom can't log into the computer. Can you fix that?”

    Spence packed his new Chromebook for fetching Internet instructions, collected zucchini, and waited while I grabbed my camera. In the truck we bounced two miles down disintegrating Creek Road.

    Kathy and I left Spence squinting at the butterfly foot sized password on the back of the router and moseyed through her Hosta garden and bunny barn. Seventeen noses wiggled in wire cages. Kathy reached inside the cage with a momma and five babies to pull out the gray baby, the smallest of the litter. It (“too small to tell which sex yet”) squealed, squirmed, and thrashed all four limbs. Kathy petted its head to calm the frightened bunny then placed it back in the cage.

   Two hours later we checked on Spence.

    “I broke it worse. Now Kathy can't log in either. I'll come back after dinner with the disk to reinstall the operating system.”

    Reinstalling the operating system got the computer working. Summer heat kept zucchini growing.

    Wednesday Spence said, “I'm going to take zucchini to Mary Ann, but don't come. I don't want to stay long.”

    I washed dishes, swept the floor, and still Spence hadn't returned. Was he fixing Mary Ann's computer too? I visualized eighty-something Mary Ann, with hands on her slim hips and stringy gray hair dangling around her shoulders, leaning over Spence while he squinted at her computer screen.

    I was wrong.

    “Mary Ann wanted to walk up the hill because her contractor told her a bald eagle had built a nest up there,” Spence said. “I knew she wouldn't be able to see it . . . ” Mary Ann lost her driver's license last year because of macular degeneration. “ . . . so I drove her up there.”

    “Did you find the nest?”

    “No. But when I took her back home, she showed me her blueberry bush. It's four times the size of your biggest one.”

    Thursday, Spence dumped an armful of garden zucchini onto the kitchen table and reached for a plastic grocery bag. He stuffed half a dozen zucchini into the bag then hung it from the red mailbox flag.

    No computer fixing. No drives to the top of the hill. Our mail carrier got Spence's message and left a note: “Thank you, Pauline.”

    Saturday, the replacement heating element for the stove arrived. Spence opened the oven door, eased down to his knees, and pulled out the broken element.

    I sat in my Adirondack chair, watched a chipmunk scamper through the pansies, and deliberated baking zucchini cake or zucchini bread–a useless exercise.

    “The clips attaching the heating element need replaced too,” Spence said.

    That night Spence dumped yet another armload of zucchini onto the kitchen table and said, “I could take some zucchini down to Barb.”

    I nodded. Barb didn't have a computer, and she could drive herself to the top of the hill to search for an eagle's nest. The question was, would she try to give Spence a stray cat or dog which had wandered to her house in search of food?