Inspiration: Moldy Food

When I was in the eleventh grade, my good friend Tiffany gave me an orange as a present one day.  I stuffed it in the side pocket of my backpack to eat later, and then never did eat it, because it was so nice of her to have given it to me as a present.  I couldn’t just consume it!  The orange started to shrivel and dry up a bit, so I stuck it in a little plastic bag and put it back into the pocket in my backpack, and wouldn’t you know, the orange started to mold.  And that is when I first started to fall in love with mold!  It was amazing how that orange turned all sorts of brilliant colors as it got mushier and mushier in the bag.  There was green mold, blue mold, orange mold, purplish mold, and brown mold, all swirling around.  It was ever changing abstract art, I’m telling you!

The rotten orange became my good luck item. I brought it to every speech meet that year and the next.  I brought it to academic olympic meets, and our team did great!  I brought it to music contest.  I enjoyed taking it out of the pocket of my backpack and  just checking how it had changed since I last examined it.  Over time I added a few plastic bags just to keep that little orange safe.  No one carried anything with them that was so unique!

I took the orange to college.  I moved the orange with me wherever I moved as my husband was in medical school.  When I was a teacher, I wrote amazing lesson plans on descriptive writing that centered around that orange  that gripped the attention of my English students and inspired some great writing. (It eventually dried up in the plastic bags and today sort of looks like crunchy green seaweed.)

I still have the orange.  It’s tucked safely away in a secret spot because it kind of grosses out my husband.  But I still love mold!  I’m always leaving things in the fridge far past their expiration  to see what happens, which also grosses my husband out.  I think the process of biodegradation is miraculous!  It has such great textures and incorporates so many interesting colors.

I’ve had in mind to photograph some moldy food for quite some time, and I’ve been on the lookout for the perfect specimen.  Lo and behold, last Monday I located a lunch box that had been sitting around for a couple of weeks.  It belonged to YaYa, so I made her unpack it.  She was disgusted enough to remark that she had learned her lesson about not unpacking her lunchbox forever more.  I think the stench got to her. Inside the lunch containers there were  some slimy peas, but TADA, there were also some pieces of clementine peel!  I rushed across the kitchen and grabbed the container right out of the hands of that eleven year old!  She asked what the fuss was about.  I replied that I’d been waiting for some moldy food.  She rolled her eyes at me and pointed to the kitchen garbage, where she’d already dumped a larger piece of clementine peel.

I rescued it in short order and put it on a cute little plate in a corner on the counter where no one else would mess with it.  YaYa asked what I could possibly be planning to do with it.  I told her I wanted to photograph it, and she rolled her eyes at me in disbelief.

An hour or so later my husband found the special little plate, and gasped.  He told me that I was not allowed to start another lucky orange bag.  I told him to back off; I’d dispose of it properly after I had photographed it.  He rolled his eyes at me too.

But, I had so much fun!  Everyone left for school and the light was perfect!  I stretched out on the floor with my camera and the orange atop of a white piece of paper and went to work right in the middle of all the toys and books and blankets and clutter of the playroom.

And now I’m on the lookout for more beautiful mold.