Zucchini Sisters

Hello...
Been a little quiet out there so I thought I'd post this lovely image to spice things up, not to mention procrastinate from doing mentally challenging work on this lovely Friday afternoon. The lady on the right is our dear friend Amy whom we have invited to begin posting to our site and to share a few photos of her sculptures soon... stay tuned. She is a fellow heart radical sister, in on our crazed laughter, annual (we aspire) writing and meditation retreats, not to mention our Zucchinis for Peace installation.

For those of you who may have missed its brief appearance in Fremont (by Adobe, in that open area with the rock sculpture and steps to the trail) one fine day a couple years ago, this is how the project evolved: Shelley was working on a farm and had access to a lot of overgrown zucchinis. Gathering them in the trunk of her car, she brought them over to my house one evening and a bunch of us (Betsy, not pictured here, included) set out to carve messages into their soft white flesh. We debated where to leave them-- somewhere people would see them, but where no one would see us laying them out. For whatever reason, (it was getting late, we didn't feel like going downtown, nor here, nor there...) we decided on this space in Fremont. Parking our car, we snuck quietly to the concrete space while carrying armloads of zucchinis, conjuring feelings of doing something illicit, like sneaking out at night as a thirteen-year-old or running from the cops after a high school keg. Anyway, traumatic memories aside, we moved quickly, each intuitively finding the right spot for our creations-- on the bench, on the steps, near the rocks-- then crept off giddy into the night. Mission accomplished!

The next day we returned to photograph our installation. I heard a woman call her friend on her lunch break, "Someone must have had a lot of extra zucchini." We watched as a group of older tourist-looking types curiously circled the squash. We tried to act surprised or nonchalant as if we were just stumbling upon them ourselves.

I hear they were gone by the next day. The next year we did it again, in Olympia this time, with pumpkins as well. Shelley then left the farm life and we have not had access to so many zucchinis anymore. Well this is a fascinating story and I suppose I'll have to post a few of the pictures now to prove how amazing it truly was.