My mother always grows too much zucchini in the summer.
She’s not alone. There are small towns in the north-eastern part of America where people only lock their cars at night during zucchini season, for fear of opening them in the morning to find a small mountain of zucchini in the backseat. People are that desperate to get rid of them. For some reason, this is something that happens every summer without fail, as if no one remembers what’s inevitably going to happen from the previous year. Maybe it’s similar to the way that women forget the pain of childbirth.
And folks get so very creative with finding uses for the darned things. One of the better ones is zucchini bread, which is more of a loaf-shaped cake than anything else. It’s yellow and sweet with green flecks throughout, best served cold with cream cheese or grilled in butter on the stove.
Somehow my mother convinced me to take some zucchini bread with me, on the plane, in my carry on. For my cousin. I’d already flatly refused to bring a box of pears from the tree in the side yard, just on general principles. I didn’t want to carry them.
But she had stayed up until 5AM baking them on one of the last nights before I left, and it really was an excellent batch, and I imagined that if I somehow survived a plane crash on a deserted island, at least I would have zucchini bread from home. So I agreed.
Flash forward several hours later, and I am trying to pass through security at the Boston airport. It’s always a little scary, letting go of my stuff. I’m standing there on the safe side of the TSA checkpoint, barefoot in my socks, clutching my jacket and shoulder bag under one arm and my boots in the other, and I hear the alarm go off. My backpack has not made it through the checkpoint. At this point, I am getting worried.
And officer beckons me over.
“Is this your bag?”
I nod, frozen.
“Okay,” he says, smugly, walks away. I hear him say something to his buddies about going to get lunch.
Shit.
Was there something I missed? Are they going to take me away for questioning? I hadn’t done anything Wrong, I’d double and triple checked everything the night before…
After a few minutes that felt like forever, another TSA officer, a big, dark-skinned woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail, came to my rescue. She unzipped my backpack, lifted out the paper bag containing my mother’s zucchini bread, and gingerly opened the bag as though it was going to explode.
It was so dense that it has showed up as suspicious looking on the scan.
“Bread,” she said, flatly.
I nodded again, tried to smile. I probably failed.
She returned the zucchini bread to the backpack, zipped the backpack shut, handed it to me, and turned away.
Shaking a little, I carried my stuff to a bench somewhere as far away as possible and put my shoes back on.
What I eventually came to think of as “that f***ing zucchini bread” is the reason they stopped me at every TSA checkpoint from America to Germany. It arrived at my cousin’s apartment a little squashed, the paper bag rumpled. We shared it with her roommates, all of whom liked the story just as much as they liked the cake.