To Create... Divine

I love to crochet, knit, crewel, sketch, color, garden, sew, design, and engage in crafts of every shape and kind. My brother was an extraordinarily talented professional dancer and had exquisite taste for interior decorating. My sister also had a designer's eye and was immensely creative in her own right. We all sang and none of us were strangers to the dance floor.

Many is the time my mother has sighed as I sat crocheting or completely absorbed in some other creative endeavor and said, "I don't know where you kids picked up all this creativity - you sure didn't get it from your mother."

She is so wrong about that.

Even though she herself didn't happen to engage in these pastimes, Mama insured that her childrens' wings were never prevented from fully unfurling in that regard. First and foremost, she instilled in each of a keen love of reading, which in turn served as the foundational springboard for venturing forth in any direction we wished to go and learning just about anything we had a mind to. She read to us as toddlers and taught us to viewed learning to read and write as a magical means of soaring in any direction and just as high and as far as our hearts desired. She bought us "Little Golden Books" and "Little Golden Records" and a record player that came in it's own "suitcase" style container. To this day, I can remember the magical tunes those bright yellow 45-rpm vinyl discs bestowed upon little ears - and to this day I remain convinced they played a major role in the love of music and dance all of Mama's children carried with them into adulthood. Mama, herself an amazingly imaginative woman, fostered and nurtured well the imaginations of her children, never quashing their potential in any way, shape, or form. She made certain that that we knew all about Santa, elves, fairies, angels, leprechauns, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy, magic, dreams, and all of their collective attendant joys. She equipped us with toys like Playdough, crayons, paints, colored pencils, beautiful jigsaw puzzles, building blocks, make-it and needlepoint kits, and children's cook- and crafting books. I can remember spending hour after many a delightfully entertaining hour making Christmas paper chains to decorate my bedroom, learning how to knit and crochet from my treasured Make-it Craft Book, cutting paper doilies, needlepointing a gorgeous yarn rose, singing and dancing and putting on "plays", drawing and painting, coloring and completing color pencil painting-by-numbers 'masterpieces', putting together puzzles and models of the human body, brain, and various wildlife, buildling sand and Playdough castles, writing stories and poems, and, of course... reading, reading, and reading some more. My childhood forays into Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, Charlotte's Web, Little Women, Little Men, Gone With the Wind, all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books such as Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods, and These Happy Golden Years... all of these and so many more remain vividly alive and well in my heart and mind's eye some five decades later.

Then, in my late 40's... I discovered CYBERSPACE ! Initially forced into using a computer for work, I soon discovered how wondrous an outlet computers, software, and the internet can be. Besides writing and reading, a whole new venue for artistic expression now stretches out before me. And on of the MANY beauties of it is - the more you learn, the more you want to learn and explore. Even if my hands some day become too old to crochet, etc. - there will always be Writing.com and Paint Shop Pro and voice activated software to use them! . I've just taught myself how to obtain and use Paint Shop Pro tubes... and now I'm a mad woman in pursuit of mastering the art of creating animations. The older I get, the more quickly I seem to be able to learn - and learning, in turn, keeps your mind <insert Beverly Hills accent here> - totally buff. Learning does for the mind what exercise and physical activity does for the body... both are age defying. My mother, despite much hardship, saw to it that her children received the seeds for a love of both... and wondrously fertile soil in which to plant them.

You don't know who gave us our creativity, Mama? You did, of course... you did.