17 zucchini

A recipe for living.

“Do you know what I did yesterday?” Willy asked me while we were basking in the hotel sauna. “I baked 17 loaves of zucchini bread.”

“That’s… a lot of zucchini bread.”

That’s also quite an undertaking for a woman in her 80s. Then again, Willy isn’t like any senior citizen I know. She’s at the pool every day, bouncing up and down and flapping her arms in the water — part of an inscrutable exercise routine that includes something resembling a yoga class in the gym once a week.

“Do you know why I baked all those zucchini loaves?” she pressed.

“To eat them!” I chimed.

She laughed. “How am I ever going to eat 17 loaves?”

“No,” she continued. “I baked them because I grew 17 zucchini in my garden. I had to do something with them.”

Willy always has to do something. Logic is secondary. Motion is the point.

She has a perfect memory too.

“How’s your book going?” she’d ask. “What’s it about again?”

How do you tell someone who squeezes every drop out of life how much of yours you smoked away in a darkened attic? Willy and I had spent a lot of time growing in opposite directions. She reached for sunlight. I reached for my pipe.

She never knew about any of that. I bet she’d be supportive. But who wants to tell someone like Willy that some people grow zucchinis in their garden — and some people spend years letting their gardens grow wild.

She did try to settle down once and enjoy retirement. “I couldn’t last a couple of months.”

So she started taking care of her great-niece, full-time. They hiked and swam and went to movies together.

Then Covid happened and Willy was exiled to her home.

“My family treated me like I had the plague,” she recalled.

That was the closest Willy ever came to feeling old. Not because her body failed her, but because the world suddenly stopped needing her.

But Willy eventually broke free. She devoted herself to gardening and taking the bus to the pool and telling jokes and doing all the things most of us slowly stop making time for.

Willy always had somewhere to go, something to grow, someone to love. She treated life like a garden: if something wasn’t blooming, she planted something new.

I spent years doing the opposite. I sat in the dark, convinced there was nothing left to grow.

Willy knew better.

Life doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. Sometimes you have to move first. Sometimes you have to plant something and trust it will grow.

“If I’m not doing,” she said, leaning toward me in the sauna, “I’m done.”