Cauliflower!

Cauliflower is beautiful to look at. It tastes great, too. If you boil it, cut it to pieces and put some salt, lemon, and chili powder all over it, you have a great snack—tons of fiber and absolutely delicious! You can also eat it raw. My father taught us how to eat the stem raw. Just peel off the thick, green, skin and sink your teeth into a sweet tasting vitamin bomb. He said that if we only ate the stem, everyday, we’d live to be 200. And we had a lot of it. Our house, the Gashouse, sat in the middle of a hundred acres of cauliflower fields. My dad was the guy who watered it. It greened up the world. I saw nothing but green from my window. And on windy days, all you smelled was green—it even ate the gas leaking from our stove.


Before the “flower” blossoms, the bugs are killed off. My father would drive around the fields putting up signs with a skull and cross bones that said: Peligro! This meant that we were not allowed to go into the field. A helicopter would wake us before sunrise: I could see the guy’s goatee from my window. He would spray the Peligro over the green. The Peligro was a white mist that smelled like….it smelled like meth! After a few days, my father would take down the skeletons and we were free to roam the fields and cut stems.

As soon as the white head of the plant grows bigger than a fist, it is wrapped up in its own leaves. A rubber band keeps the head inside its leafy cocoon. Illegals do that part of nature’s work. Bees are overly qualified. Days later, another crew of unwanteds comes and cuts the head off, wraps it in a plastic bag, and sends it to your kitchen. After all the heads are gone, a tractor comes and razes whatever is left. The next day the sun cooks whatever is laying on the ground. The air smells like rotting flesh. But it is not overbearing. It is a comfortable smell of death. It became familiar to us, like the Peligro and the green.

Those fields are our killing fields. I’ll tell you how later, even though it matters little to question the methodologies of death.