Uses of a Cauliflower

Making dinner tonight – Friday, by the way…not Thursday – I was slicing cauliflower very thinly and admiring the fine tracery its silhouette made against the dark background of my cutting board. Of course, my mind immediately jumped to how a fairy might use thinly sliced cauliflower as a backdrop for their nightly theater (wouldn’t your mind jump there, also?) They’d use broccoli for tree props, naturally, the “trunks” wrapped in brown grass to simulate bark, but to get that suggestion of distant birch trees under the moon, cross-sections of cauliflower would be just perfect.

I explained this to Ed over dinner. Bless the man…he just smiled, and nodded, and said, “Of course.” Then I told him a little story….

In 1988, my little family moved to Kentucky. We bought a great little property: an acre or so in the middle of town, with a sparkling creek that ran through the back at the foot of a steep hill. My husband and I built a darling little bridge with 2 felled trees and a bunch of boards, and we put in a garden on the other side of the creek.

The garden had several beds, with upright supports at one end for beans and peas. One morning, I walked down to the creek, over the bridge, and into the garden to do some tending and found a massive, beautiful spider web strung perfectly from one pole to another. It must have been three feet across, and it was jeweled with dew that sparkled in the early morning light. I stood, transfixed, for long minutes, taking in the lovely symmetry, the elaborate design, the perfect execution—then finally turned to do my chores.

Later, I stood before the web again, thinking of ways I could preserve such a magnificent specimen. I thought, perhaps, I could spray it with silver paint and carefully use black posterboard to “scoop” it onto; or maybe I could…

As I was considering options, a small, flying beetle blundered into the web, shaking it violently. In the time it took for me to gasp and for my mouth to form an “O,” the spider zipped over to the beetle and gave it a practiced bounce. I never saw how she did it, but in no time at all, that beetle was wrapped up and hanging from one of the cross-pieces of the web and the spider was back in her place as though nothing had happened at all. I was shaken, though the web was now still.

My experience with spiders had been limited to Daddy-Long-Legs that got into the house and strung scrappy webbings in the corners of the ceiling. Detroit didn’t have black widows or brown recluse spiders, or any other scary spiders that I knew about. Spiders were funny old-man-like things that wobbled comically across their artless stringings. I’d seen beautiful gossamers before, certainly, but had never understood their purposeful design or seen the spider’s deadly expertise.

Just after that incident, I read The Hobbit for the first time. When Bilbo and the dwarves got to the Forest and had their encounter with the spiders, I felt that encounter viscerally. The stickiness of the webbing, the quickness of the spiders, the bobbing figures on the lines overhead, even the smell of the loam underfoot as Bilbo jumped and scrambled and dodged about—all was so immediate and personal. I read the entire section with eyes so wide open that they stuck when I finally tried to blink!

The Hobbit lead right into the Lord of the Rings, of course, and my heart contracted with horror when the monstrous Shelob stalked the hobbits in her lair. I felt the sting of the venom with Frodo, and shouted out with Samwise as he battled the malicious beast. This was what it had felt like for the beetle!

What does this have to do with thinly-sliced cauliflower? Nothing, and everything. Imagination is a POWERFUL thing, and creativity relies entirely on the imagination. I cannot create something until I can see it in my mind, and neither can a reader. I look at cauliflower and see fairy props. Presented properly, I can make a reader see that too if he's ever seen cauliflower. That’s the difficulty with fiction—fantasy and sci-fi in particular—points of reference are essential, they give the reader a connection, an image, a reason to care. I CARED about Bilbo and Frodo because they were battling a spider—if they’d fought a wombat or a horned-gruntlebeast I’d have been “ho-hum…another monster.” But I FELT the sticky web, the burning sting, the sweaty fear of a known (if much smaller) danger.

[Raise my right hand] So, I solemnly pledge from this day forward to have faith in the imagination of my reader, and to supply adequate reference points of a familiar nature (and no wombats). Amen.