Free Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link

behind the counter, and three women customers considering the pastry case turn and stare.
    The bakery is silent, except for the sound of industrial-grade mixers coming from the kitchen.
    “Mike!” the old woman behind the counter yells, not taking her eyes off the squashes. “Better come out!”
    Popeye Mike appears, wiping his hands on the front of his apron. He looks at me, then at the boys; then his dark eyes widenas they come to rest on the two squashes. The boys strain and hold them up for inspection, turning them this way and that. Their pale rinds catch the light and they begin to gleam.
    “We’d really like to enter both of these into your contest,” I tell him. “We’re just not sure that they’re zucchinis.”
    My sons purse their lips and frown, as if I were revealing military secrets. Popeye Mike comes out from around the counter and kneels down in front of both the boys and runs his hands over each of their squashes. He squints, he flicks them with his thumb and forefinger, he bends down and sniffs them.
    “May I?” he asks Luke. Luke nods his assent. Popeye needs both hands to grip my middle son’s squash and heft it up into the light. He turns it first one way, then another, then hands it back to its owner.
    “May I?” he asks Will, who cannot hold his in his arms any longer but is sitting on the floor cross-legged with his squash in his lap. Will nods too, and Popeye Mike repeats his inspection … then makes his one-word determination: “Zucchini.”
    “Yesssss!” Will says, making a fist and bringing it down to rest near his waist like a pendulum.
    “Who’s your daddy!” Luke shouts.
    “These are the rarest of the rare, the white zucchini, and they only appear every seven years,” explains Popeye Mike. “They make a zucchini bread like no other.”
    The old woman behind the counter looks down suspiciously over her cat-eye glasses but smiles in spite of herself. The shoppers forget all about pastries and gather around my sons, admiring their squashes. Popeye Mike is talking now of zucchini muffins and zucchini bread and even mulling the viability of chocolate-frosted zucchini bars.
    This is all well and good, but what I want is the store credit. That’s what victory means to me.
    “Did we win?” I ask.
    “Did you win?! Did you win?!” Popeye Mike stands up guffawing, and walks back to the counter. “Look!”
    Displayed in a basket on top of the counter is our competition. They are so inconsequential that I haven’t even noticed them. A dozen or so dark-green zucchinis no bigger than a small submarine sandwich. Popeye Mike takes our squashes and puts them on the counter next to the basket. They are bigger than all of their competitors combined. They are bigger, by far, than the basket. Popeye Mike holds his paunch and laughs harder.
    “You just won first
and
second place! Boys, why don’t you pick out a cookie while I settle up with your ma.”
    On the ride home, the boys’ laps are empty, but their hands each hold a giant chocolate-chip cookie. They are a two-man army now, for a few minutes at least, not distant enemies at war with each other, and this makes me feel good.
    There was a flaw in our battle plan. If we had entered three zucchinis instead of just two, I’m convinced, we would have won first, second,
and
third place.
    Still, for once I—no,
we
—have done something right.
    I bungled our finances and allowed my own sadness to infect my sons. Our horses are gone and so is most of our money. But this, this growing of secret-weapon zucchini over a single moon phase with the discipline and hard work of my sons, we’ve done just about perfectly.

4
October 2005
REAPING MOON
    A fool I was to sleep at noon
,
    And wake when night is chilly
    Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
    A fool to pluck my rose too soon
,
    A fool to snap my lily
.
    My garden-plot I have not kept;
    Faded and all-forsaken
,
    I weep as I have never wept:
    Oh it was summer when I slept
,
    It’s winter