Remembering Crayons

I’ve been trying and trying to think of a very profound First Blog Post that expresses the ultimate theme and mission of my blog.

(waiting-room music)

Okay, enough waiting. I want to be expansive on this blog. And when I am feeling most expansive, the first thing that happens is that I can really see what’s right in front of me.

It’s crayons. My sweetheart and I were doing a puzzle of a closeup photo of Crayola crayons, and off we went into memory land. The speckled quality of the soft paper wrappings. The contrast, specific to each crayon, between the paper color and the waxy smoothness of the crayon. The way the color felt going on to the paper. The blending. The boldness of taking the paper off and using the side of the crayon to make a big wide swathe of color.

The few-and-far-between days when you got a new 64-color box. Sixty-four colors! And the box had an actual crayon sharpener built into it!

The magenta. The (oh my gosh) green-blue (not blue-green, that was a whole different color).

The time we did a mural about colonial times at school and I got to color the fire. The other kids were drawing big log cabins, fields, and animals. I spent my entire time on this little picture of a campfire. The excitement happened when I realized I could use red and orange and red-orange. The smooth waxy surface getting denser and shinier as I smooshed the colors together. The fire, dark on the inside and yellower on the edges, springing to fiery life under my small pushing hand.

Most kids these days draw with colored markers, which are quite marvelous for their color saturation. But I remember crayons.

Maybe that’s why I grew up to love colored pencil!

And I’m grateful for color in my life. There.