My Childhood Muse

As a late-blooming artist, I often have wondered how my interest and ability ever came about. I recently learned a story that suggests at least my passion might have been active even during my early childhood. I’m told that when I was just three years old, living with my family in Brookline, MA, a next-door neighbor, Dr. Olive Smith, observed me early one morning lugging a small empty aquarium out onto a sunlit spot on our front lawn, repeatedly tipping it over in a scooping motion, clutching it to my chest, and then carrying it carefully back up my porch steps. When she approached me and asked what I was doing, I reportedly said,

“I am capturing sunlight and taking it back inside so I’ll have it with me whenever I want it!”

Now as a quilt artist, I guess my childhood muse is still trying to capture light in all of its fascinating and variable forms.