Hasselback butternut squash and the plenitude of the universe

Maybe the world is more generous than we think

Thank you, thank you, beautiful people who have signed up for a paid subscription! You are amazing. Here is a gentle reminder that you, too, can be a paid subscriber and read my first paid post, here, all about how I found and lost my agent, including an example of a query letter for a nonfiction book.

I have a complicated relationship with winter squash. On the one hand, long before the chaos of the pandemic, I was a little obsessed with hoarding squash each winter. We’ve all been there, right? I’m not the only one who sometimes worries that the entire global infrastructure will collapse, plunging us back into a barter economy where my winter squash will be worth its vegetable weight in gold, right? No? That’s just me? Okay, fine.

But this Thanksgiving I’m contemplating winter squash as a sign of the universe’s incredible generosity.

It starts with the new raised beds my husband built in the spring. He used corrugated metal bought to help construct the doors in our party pavilion during that first pandemic summer. The sheets stuck together at the hardware store, which meant he ended up with extra metal we could use for the raised beds—thank you, unintended generosity of a corporate home store megalith!

You cannot conceive of how happy this picture makes me. All the squash! Photo by Andie Kolbeck on Unsplash

We decided to build one long raised bed for the tomatoes, which takes a lot of soil to fill. We were contemplating hügelkultur and trying to figure out where to get that much dirt when I ran into our neighbor. He had a surplus of good compost he was willing to share and—extra bonus—a truck to haul it in. Thank you, Jim and Margo!

Did I see the seeds in the soil when we filled the raised beds? Of course. Did I contemplate what might happen? Sure. Did I care? Not much. The unpredictability of gardening is both its bane and its delight.

We had a bumper crop of tomatoes with our super-healthy compost (thanks again, Jim and Margo!), but inevitably, a squash vine appeared, winding its way through the tomatoes. It wasn’t until later in the summer that we realized it was a butternut squash vine.

We ended up picking three butternut squash, including the rather large one we found when we cleaned out the raised bed this fall, a squash that had been growing secretly, hidden among the riotous vines. Thank you Nature, which provides for us even in the face of our total neglect and indifference!

For our Thanksgiving meal, I decided to use the big surprise squash that Jeff picked while fighting dead tomato vines, but I could have used the butternut squash our generous friends gave us, having had a bumper butternut year themselves. Thank you, Kate and Don!

And it never would have occurred to me to cook a butternut squash hasselback-style, except our lovely friends served one to us at dinner, so thanks for the recipe, too, Kate!

So to summarize, I’m thankful for sticky metal, compost generosity, persistent seeds and shared recipes. I’m grateful, too, for the pie pumpkins I bought from our friends at Splinter Ridge Farm and used to make pumpkin puree (after using them for table décor for the past two months) for my bourbon pumpkin cheesecake. I’m grateful for the sustainable and locally raised turkey we’ll be serving up, from our friends at Nightfall Farm. I’m also grateful for all our amazing friends and to live in the kind of community that leans toward sharing and compassion more often than not.

I’m grateful for butternut squash, which, yes, I could hoard, prepper-style, telling myself it’s a shield against the inevitable chaos of the world. Or I could see the squash as the universe gently nudging me to focus on benevolence rather than greed. On what’s in front of me right now, instead of what might be down the road. Today, I’m taking the butternut squash as a message from a plentiful universe.

What are you grateful for today?