Harvest

The fear I had built up for myself as we planted our garden in the spring about mountains of zucchini never fully materialized. Memories of a back yard that became infested with great green tubes of squash I endured as my father could not contain the creeping vines that he maintained. We, as a family, were subjected to a seemingly endless variety of recipes and uses for all that vegetable matter. When my wife suggested we put some zucchini in our summer plot a few months ago, she noticed that I flinched. PZSD: Post Zucchini Stress Disorder.
That never happened. We had a few very polite orbs that we sliced up and used in a stir-fry. And that was about it. By contrast, we had a couple of cherry tomato vines that brought us a salad's worth red and yellow accents. Delicious and  not  at all oppressive. We were making our own food from seeds. Some of it, anyway.
And then there was the sunflower. It was a spindly little thing we bought at the nursery along with all that potential roughage we were putting in the boxes nest to our front fence. We planted it as a tribute to my father's Kansas heritage. You know: Kansas, the Very Flat Sunflower State.
For a while, there was some concern that the red chard or the cucumber might overwhelm our little tribute. Our concern was unfounded. Soon we began to worry about the other plants being bullied by the ever-expanding stalk that was our little sunflower.
Sometime around July, little was not how we would have described our sunflower. It was also not immediately apparent what that what we had planted was a flower of any sort. Just a shoot that was steadily becoming a trunk.
In August, we started to see a bulge near the top of what had become a six foot tall monstrosity with no end in sight. We began to worry that maybe there would be no actual flower and that once the clouds were reached, the only recourse would be to climb up on up to look for some giant's castle. Once school began, the disk burst forth in what turned into the only limit this plant would experience was the one it put out itself. That great big flower stopped its upward spiral. Finally we had a beast that could be tamed. And finally, after we had propped it up and strapped it to the fence to try to keep it stable, we realized the time had come. Timber.
My wife says we will probably get fistfuls of seeds. Some of them will be eaten. And some of them will find their way back into the soil. Where they will probably eventually take over the world.