Ann's Starry Night

You can call it mid-mid summer, maybe. Our back-yard cicadas, if that's what they are, have cranked up the volume by day, and the crickets are beginning to sound off by night.

We haven't been out to see many dark skies this summer, but even in the washed-out suburban skies I point out things to my children. I can't be sure whether anything I say adds to the sum total of what they see, yet I offer my comments anyway. But it wasn't me who showed a print of "The Starry Night" to Ann. Toward the end of first grade, her art teacher did, and then Ann painted this:

I didn't see it until the other day. Ann had brought it home with other school-debris, and it was shunted off somewhere or other. It's too large to scan, so I photographed it, which has washed out some of the deep blues she used. So the original is more vivid than my image here, and the texture of the brush strokes, especially of the "wind," is hard to see in the photo.

Normally I don't gush much over my children's artwork -- they're usually childish pieces, after all -- but this one's an interesting creation for a seven-year-old.