A brownie-muffin for zucchini season

My grandmother has always been a rattler.

When I was a child, she gave me a book called “Gus Was a Friendly Ghost,” about a genial little ghost who makes grilled-cheese sandwiches and occasionally gives himself away by bumping around somewhere out of sight. Gus cannot help rattling. He is a ghost. It’s what they do.

This is, more or less, my grandmother’s domestic mode.

She has always been an early riser, padding around in sock feet before almost anyone else was awake, a habit that seemed perfectly reasonable on the slightly tacky black-and-white linoleum of her kitchen and substantially less reasonable on the polished wooden staircase leading down to it. By the time the rest of us began stirring, she had already been conducting a small invisible orchestra downstairs: cabinet doors opening and closing, coffee being made, forks clicking against bowls as she whipped eggs for my grandfather.

Years ago, you could sometimes hear the coiled cord of the kitchen landline being pulled to its absolute physiological limit as she attempted to reach the far side of the room and speak “quietly” to one of her church friends, who had apparently also decided that 6:30 in the morning was an excellent time for a chat.

None of this bothered me. Quite the opposite.

There is a particular kind of safety in waking to the sound of someone else already tending to the world. I have always slept better in apartment buildings than in silent houses, soothed by footsteps overhead and doors closing somewhere down the hall. Only recently have I considered that I may have my grandmother — and my mother after her — to thank for this. Somewhere very early, I learned that rattling meant somebody was awake. Somebody had things in hand.

Her kitchen changed costumes over the years, but I remember the sheep era best: black-and-white checked curtains over the sink, black-and-white linoleum underfoot and little sheep occupying every available territory — the freezer, the windowsill, the shelves. Some were knitted, some fluffy, some wooden. My brothers were particularly fond of one wooden ewe mounted on wheels, which gave her the jaunty appearance of a sheep who had recently discovered skateboarding.

Into this room my grandmother rattled every morning.

And when one of us finally came padding down the wooden stairs, sleepy and rumpled and operating on a schedule she would never have personally endorsed, there was no reproach. She would simply look up and ask:

There was no wrong answer.

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There was, in fact, very little discernible boundary in my grandmother’s house between breakfast, snack and dessert. If I had requested a Big Loafer steak sandwich and bacon at eight in the morning, I suspect her only follow-up would have been, “One piece or two?”

Breakfast might mean scrambled eggs, oatmeal or toast. It might also mean a thick slice of homemade apple Bundt cake under a generous coat of cream cheese icing, eaten with coffee. What mattered was less that the meal satisfied any established definition of breakfast than that, sometime after waking, you had allowed yourself to be fed.

When we came to visit, certain foods seemed simply to materialize in her refrigerator in anticipation of us: a big bowl of macaroni salad flecked with jewel-bright bits of red and green pepper; mandarin “fluff”; a pecan-crusted cheese ball; the apple cake. And, for me, a loaf of chocolate zucchini bread from a little Amish market and greenhouse somewhere outside Ona, West Virginia.

The loaf came tightly wrapped in cling film with a small white sticker bearing a line drawing of a blue barn. It was dark and deeply moist, a little earthy without tasting particularly of vegetables, and studded throughout with hunks of chocolate. We ate thick slices with cold salted butter — not so much smeared across the crumb as laid on in pale slabs, because patience has never been a prerequisite for breakfast.

My grandmother always put food on an actual plate. She would not necessarily sit down with you; chances were good that she had eaten hours earlier, at some time I associated primarily with airport departures and dairy farming.

Besides, there was more rattling to do.

And for a stretch of my teens and early adulthood, I often told her no.

“Oh, you know I’m not really eating breakfast.”

Or, “I’m feeling a little queasy this morning.”

Both were usually euphemisms for the same thing: I was dieting, and I had already begun the day’s arithmetic. Like many millennial girls who came of age when diet culture was practically an extracurricular activity, I could mentally toggle between Weight Watchers points and the “Pocket Calorie Counter” with alarming fluency.