I remember the day I learned to really speak.

It was 1973.  Wandering in my parents’ cornfield, enjoying the hot sunlight on my shoulders and feeling the brush of cornhusks along my shoulders like the absentminded hands of taller people. Every stalk of corn was an imaginary friend, and their buds of corn, their infant babies.

Every now and then I’d stop and stroke the silky hair of a ripening corn cob, marveling at the  nearly white strands, when the thought struck me: yellow. Corn. Sun.

The Light that feeds us, not just the imaginary. The plants, the people, all of us.

What makes the colors? What makes the green beans green? Because they grow from the ground? Where does the color come from?

What did God use to build the world? He must have used colors; and lines; and shapes; and light.

Could I draw and color the world God built? And then could I carry that with me, and give it away, and fill the world with it again, for when others were lonely, and had no light?

It was 1973. That was when I knew what I wanted to do and be.