I manned the farm stand for the first few days, but then I had to lay myself off. Staff cuts due to restructuring resulted in my job of running the farm stand being outsourced to a coffee container with a slit in its lid and a note that read, "Pay what you can." Automation is taking over everything these days. I changed the sign to read: "(Honor System) Wild Food Farm Stand."

Rehiring myself as a freelance harvester, I was able to expand and diversify the farm stand's inventory. Now we carried wild strawberries, which were like tiny red grenades that exploded into giant strawberry flavor. And Johnny Jump-Ups, a type of viola, which made a cheery flower salad (if you didn't mind eating something with a face).

Also, we had the first of many, many zucchinis.

Years back, I had run into a nature photographer who was taking pictures of strange black clouds that were expanding and contracting, rising and falling in the sky like wax in a lava lamp. The nature photographer explained that these were not clouds at all, but thousands of starlings, traveling in a murmuration, which I guess is a poetic way of saying "thundercloud that blots out the sun and rains poo." The photographer told me that in 1890 a man named Eugene something-or-other, head of the American Acclima-something-or-other Society, got the romantic notion to bring all the birds ever mentioned in Shakespeare to America. So, he did—releasing a few starlings (among other, less ambitious birds) in Central Park.

"O brave new world!" said the starlings.

"Oops," said Eugene something-or-other, a few years later, when the sky went dark.

I mention this because at 3:22 PM on June 17th (give or take a few days) I celebrated as the first couple of zucchinis ("Long Green Trailing") arrived on my vines like the first pair of starlings nesting in the eaves of New York's Museum of Natural History. 

Hooray!

Soon there would be no getting rid of them.