With the spider missing and feared dead—lost like little Virginia Dare in a new world too big and strange and wild—I figured it would be best to carry on with life as I knew it. Surely the little spider would've wanted it that way. So I spent the morning working, as usual, at my kitchen table, which was in actuality a giant wooden spool that I'd scavenged from a ditch along the Old Mill Road. (It made an excellent table. Since it had no legs, it was never wobbly—a definite plus if you live in an unlevel rhomboidal home.)

Instead of working, I knew I really should be dealing with my zucchini situation, lest it become a full-blown Zucchini Problem. You see, every winter I would start seeds in my kitchen, and plant them out in the spring. It was high time to move the seedlings outside this year, particularly the new zucchini I'd gotten from Gladys, who'd gotten it from her eleventy-nine-year-old neighbor, who'd gotten it from a mysterious society of seed traders that I pictured wearing brown hooded robes and using secret knocks. "Marrow, Long Green Trailing," it said on the seed envelope, in spiky old-person handwriting that resembled a seismogram.

Well, the zucchini, maybe feeling pressure to live up to its "long" name, had overflowed its steamer trunk planter and was climbing the kitchen walls in a desperate urge to get out.

It looked harmless enough at the moment—pretty, even, with its flowers like golden stars, each one bursting into being and going nova in a single day; it was the ever-changing constellation Cucurbita.

But one mustn't be lulled into complacency. You can never let your guard down with zucchini. Turn your back and before you know it, it's multiplying out of control like the buckets and broomsticks in Fantasia.

So I decided to compromise between work and zucchini management. Instead of working on a poem, I decided to write a pointed essay denouncing unchecked zucchini proliferation. I read the essay aloud to the zucchini. If the pen truly was mightier than the sword (or the garden shears), then I trusted my zucchini situation would resolve itself without the need for violent reprisals.