art

Judging from the picture above you may suspect that I have been lying this whole time and that the move across town I’ve been talking about was really a move to Seattle. You think I would do that to you? Lie about where we have moved? Then you mistake me for someone who has anything resembling a poker face. Ask anyone who knows me offline: if my life depended on my keeping secret the fact that I have just stolen a bag of gummy bears from a convenience store, I would very nicely say to the investigating police officer, “I will share the candy with you, Ma’am. Just please don’t get mad at the cashier who didn’t see me leave with my pockets full.”

All that verdant foliage you see is from the completely insane winter we experienced, a record-breaking day of rain in March, March 2017 ITSELF, and oh… look! It’s been raining nonstop for three straight days, and snow is in the forecast for the next 48 hours! If this kind of weather continues, I will leave Utah, MOM. You better settle up with the guy in the sky and tell him that this little apostate is threatening to relocate your grandchildren to somewhere that doesn’t suck.

Wait. Sorry, guys.

This post is about optimism! And I am full of this emotion because of current, recent, not-long-ago things I’ve been through, but this rain is harshing my mellow! FOUR TWENTY.

Last year I partnered with the folks over at Life is Good for a t-shirt contest they were throwing, and Marlo was confused a bit when I asked her to draw what makes life good. I wasn’t blogging very often at the time, but I explain in this IG caption:

When I asked Marlo to draw “what makes life good” she refused to do so until I clarified whether I was talking about yesterday, today or tomorrow. I shrugged and said, “RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND” because if you want to get into details, you came to the wrong wrestling match, amateur.
 

She very quickly illustrated a park with a pond, a sleeping dog and a giant butterfly. “We are close enough RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND to the weather when all of this can happen!” she explained as she circled her hand above the paper. Utah cleared her youthful adoration of winter right up!

She could have drawn the same thing as we teamed up with them this year, and everyone in Utah would have been, “YUP!” Including the diehard skiers who see that it snowed 10 inches in the canyons yesterday and are like, “I have to carpe diem again?”

Seizing the essence of life is major work, bruh.

This year Marlo approached the whole process a little more thoughtfully and drew a tiny version of herself cleaning up trash.

“Life is good because we can clean up the earth and stuff and that is fun.” It also helps if you know how to do it while also doing yoga:

Those are her exact words. I did not prompt this in any way, although I had always dreamed of giving birth to a child who would romanticize litter.

Leta didn’t show me her drawing for several hours, and when she finally did she apologized and said had “traced” the saxophone wrong.

“You mean you didn’t draw this?” I asked.

“Of course I drew this, what do you mean?!” as if I were the investigating police officer and the saxophone a bag of gummy bears.

“You said, ‘TRACED,’ just now.”

“Oh, I did? I meant that I had drawn a pencil version and was drawing over it onto the official form,” she explained.

“You drew this saxophone? And this violin? Really?”

“YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME? You know I’m in an art class now, right?!”

“Oh, I know,” I said, trying to wring every drop I could out of this interrogation. “But I can’t believe this is about music and there isn’t an SOS somewhere that says PLEASE SEND HELP MY MOM HAS KIDNAPPED ME AND IS MAKING ME PRACTICE PIANO UNTIL I BLEED.”

“I’ll save that plea for an Instagram story,” she said as she gently took the paper out of my hand, turned on her heels, and dropped the mic.

……

Have your child (age 4-17) draw why life is good, and their design could become a future Life is Good tee or win them a $2,000 scholarship!. Plus, for every entry Life is Good will donate $1 to help kids in need. Get an entry form at LifeisGood.com/ArtContest.