It had the roundness of a Concord grape Papa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio. The word “moon” came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. Of a certain word, that is the connection it has with what it stands for. In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of the word. Or now and then we’ll hear from an artist who’s never lost it. It looks like the town’s on fire already, whichever ways you turn, ever’ street you strike, because there’s those trees hanging them pones of bloom like split watermelon. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson-as shouldn’t it be? Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. In a children’s art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments.
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