This is what I'd learned about pawpaw trees. There's a reason they weren't found in a guide to local flora at the library. Come to find out, the pawpaw was a little out of its element; like me, it came from Kentucky or thereabouts. Maybe Indiana, or Ohio. Someone must have brought it here, once upon a time. Or maybe a seed got eaten by a possum that got eaten by a raptor that was on its way from Kentucky to wherever raptors went.

I'd also learned that pawpaw leaves were the source of food for the zebra swallowtail butterfly. Pawpaw leaves were to zebra swallowtails what bamboo was to pandas, what eucalyptus leaves were to koala bears, what hot dogs were to Gladys's kids. Which is to say, the only thing they ever ate, and if you took it away, then they (zebra swallowtails/pandas/koalas/my nephews) would probably go extinct.

By late summer the pawpaws had started to ripen, and I ate luscious custardy pawpaw fruits for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and what I didn't eat, I piled onto the farm stand. That was exactly what I was doing-arranging an armload of pawpaws on the table-when a sheriff's deputy pulled up. I wondered if he'd gotten hungry on a stake-out and was exploring healthy alternatives to fast food.

The deputy got out, scanned all around as if he'd never been outside his car before, nodded, and said, "Mawnin'."

I smiled and agreed that it was (morning).

"See ya gotcherself a farm stand? 'Waahhhld foods.' Thatsa new 'un." He drawled heavily, which was really a matter of choice in these parts. It's not like back in Kentucky where most folks from the mountains (like Gran-pappy and Maw-maw, who I'd met on the phone, and Daddy's cousin Gus, who came to Hollywood once) just naturally talked that way, their vowels rising and falling like the rolling hills. Here, it either meant you were from someplace further south, or you sort of did it on purpose because you wanted folks to know you were a good ol' boy. I asked the deputy if he was from the area originally.

"Heresburg bawn-n-raised," he said.

"World's best ground-cherry pie?" I offered.

"Bes' bo-lieve it." He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops, rocked on his feet, and slowly examined the items on the table, occasionally shaking his head and saying waahld foods, with this amused, dubious tone as if he were saying, taahm mushine.

I described our current offerings. "Our" meaning "me and the coffee can," I guess. While the flying squirrels enjoyed hanging out at the farm stand for Take Your Flying Squirrels to Work Day, they'd shown no real interest in going into any particular line of work. The lazy squirrels were at that moment asleep in the bottom of my shirt pocket-this warm, barely-there weight over my heart.

Besides zucchini, mostly what we had at the farm stand were Every Flavor Beans. I'd managed to sprout them from a mangled bag of "12-bean soup mix" that $hop$mart had thrown in the dumpster for being past its expiration date. When I'd found the bag it had been the middle of winter and I was fiercely hungry, having run out of everything except sprouty potatoes and shrunken apples. It was all I could do not to make a huge pot of that soup immediately, boiling it up in a big pot on my wood-burning stove. But, I'd figured: Make 12-bean soup and eat for a day; plant the beans in spring and-if they grew-you ate for a lifetime.

Well, they grew; boy howdy they grew. Some wanted to grow on poles, and some wanted to grow as bushes, and some didn't know what they wanted but kind of rambled around like they were "finding themselves." They were black, brown, red, pink, white, and pinto. They were lentils, black-eyed peas, limas, and garbanzo beans (which sounded like something you'd say jumping out of a plane: gar-BANZ-o!). And some were not even beans at all, but turned out to be English peas. Those weren't so thrilled about being born in the summer, but they grew anyway, if a bit brown and straggly.

Also at the farm stand, we had poems. But popularity-wise those ranked a bit lower than the lima beans, which is to say, they were not a hot item.

The deputy poked at a pile of small pods, each hiding two or three baby green chickpeas crouched fetally inside.

"Garbanzo!" I said, startling the deputy a little. I thought I saw his hand jerk toward his holster, just for a second.

"Comeagain?"

"Garbanzos-that's them."

The deputy did not look impressed.

I told him that our newest arrival was the pawpaw fruit, which I personally recommended, describing it as kind of the creme-filled doughnut of the fruit world. Then I wondered if maybe that was the wrong thing to say; you know, playing into stereotypes about deputies and doughnuts and all that.

The deputy scrunched up his face when he examined the pawpaws. They were squishy, more pudding than fruit, and they started to go bad almost as soon as you picked them. Farm stand customers turned a wary eye to the bruised, homely pawpaws, which were usually haloed by a cloud of fruit flies.

Then he examined the coffee can, trying to peer through the slit in the lid. He gave it a little shake, but it sounded as loud as one hand clapping because it was empty. He put back the can, straightened up, and hooked his thumbs even further into his belt loops. I wondered if his thumbs were holding up his pants.

"So . . . reckon ya gotchyerself a permit?" he said.

"A permit?"

"Yeah, gone need a permit to sell food."

He leaned sideways for a better look at the farm stand itself, and knocked on the wood. "This here's a wheel?"

"Not when it's circle-side down," I told him. "Then it's more of a table."

"Does it move?"

I had to laugh. If he only knew how un-moveable it could be.

"'Cause, move, and you gone need a peddler's license."

"That's crazy," I said. "I don't even own a bicycle."

The deputy pondered this and sighed. He said, "Look, I got nothin' 'gainst ord'nary citizens tryin' to make an honest buck. But I'm over a barrel, here. There been a lotta complaints, know'um sayin'?"

I looked off to my left, down the dusty, deserted road. I looked off to my right, down the dusty, deserted road. I looked at the deputy. Complaints from where? I wondered. But then I realized: Ahh. The mogul.

"Soooo . . . if you don't have yerself a permit, 'fraid I'm gonna hafta-"

"-What about poetry?" I asked.

"What about poe-tree?"

"To sell poetry, do you need like, a creative license, or something?"

The deputy stared at me for a moment, then chuckled. "Cree-ative license. Heh." But he didn't say no. Or yes.

The deputy took out a little notepad thingy and started writing something down.

"Oh, and there's been reports, uhm, of you keepin' waahld critters as pets, s'that so?"

"That there've been reports?"

"That you been keeping waahld critters as pets," he huffed, as if I were being deliberately dense.

I thought, Well, that's silly-if you keep a wild animal as a pet, it isn't wild anymore, is it? But I just shook my head.

"So you ain't keeping no waahld critters?"

I shook my head again.

"Some kinda rodents, maybe? Some kinda . . . squrls? Cause that's dangerous, ya hear? What with rabies an' all."

Well now, that just wasn't so. And good thing, too. Imagine packs of fearless killer bunnies roaming the countryside! Imagine mice and gerbils foaming at the mouth, viciously chomping our ankles like land piranhas! But I knew from the library, basically nobody gets rabies from rodents. I'd have a better chance of catching plague. And I trusted those books and those computers at the library more than I trusted the deputy, polite though he was. But I just said, "No, sir, no wild squirrels. Nope."

"Well, I best not find outcha do, 'cause it's against the law."

I felt the squirrels shift in their sleep just then. I was getting nervous they'd choose that moment to peek out of my pocket.

The deputy clickity-clicked his ballpoint pen and asked if he could have my name and address.

"How about I write it down for you," I said, reaching for my pencil and notepaper. I was running pretty low on blank sheets. "Do you want that name with or without a poem?"

"Comeagain?"

"A poem. You want one?" I nodded toward my little stack of finished poems. "They're fresh and non-GMO."

He looked at the poems, the odes and sonnets and whatnot, the way a kid might look at a plate of creamed spinach.

"Aww . . . naw . . . that's okay. Not 'less you got any of them limericks, like, 'There once was a feller from Little Rock,' dah dah dah. That's more my speed, ya know?"

"Hmm."

I used a small, rough rock to whittle my old pencil to a lopsided point that resembled the Matterhorn. Okay, I was stalling a little. Then I wrote:

There was a coyote named Wile E.
who thought of his talents quite highly,
but with Acme's inventions
his best of intentions
had a habit of going awry-ly.

I handed it to the deputy.

He stared at the poem, bewildered. Then he began to smile. "Well . . . shucks," he said. "Always did like them Roadrunner cartoons."

(In the end he let me go with a warning.

In a bureaucracy, sometimes you gotta grease some palms.)