"Snow bear... no, wait. A yeti!"
Kids fly through life faster than the rate at which color can leach from every shaft of hair on your head once you hit forty. That said, change is (painfully at times) slow to happen, but once locked into place it starts to feel as though things have always been that way, and you quickly find that you can't even recall how life was before she was able to do x. I wish I were better at documenting those times when I saw a fundamental shift in Hannah's growth, and now I can only remember two instances: This past weekend when she finally showed me the drawing below, which she'd been hunched over for a good hour, and in January 2004, when I discovered her in a similar position, black pencil tightly clutched in a small fist, sheets of paper scattered everyplace. Then, she'd just started writing letters of the alphabet, beginning with the letter H.
So what's special about this drawing? The lines. She's moving from quick, bold, continuous strokes, like here, to short, sketchy strokes, building her shapes at a slower rate, but with that trademark sureness of purpose. Very little's been erased -- the smudges are where she rested her hand while drawing.
February 5, 2008
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Jail looks like a person: Hannah doesn't know why it has a face (whew!), she just likes it that way.
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Paper + string + clay = The armature that wanted to be a bear but instead became a mouse (sadly, his tail broke off in the kiln). And a tribute to Meredith Dittmar.
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