Burchfield's Nature

Thirty-seven years ago I flipped through a TIME magazine and spotted an image that still haunts and inspires me. I tore the story out of the magazine, and filed it in my first file cabinet. That image was Charles E. Burchfield's painting, "Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon." It felt true to my experiences watching sphinx moths around the honeysuckle, catching fireflies, clover, dandelions, playing hide and seek outside just before bedtime, and spitting watermelon pits in the dark. It was beautiful, eerie, and symbolic.



Charles Burchfield's painting gave me a new way to look at the soft, rich, dark colors of evening, the glows, hums, and flutters against the window screen. It was a wonderful bridge between my personal summertime experiences, and Van Gogh's "Starry Night."

Twenty-five years passed. I became an accidental art teacher and sometime storytime lady. I pasted the Burchfield image on a sheet of paper with another saved image of a dandelion seed head. This week I dug that paper out of an old file to show students.

Children are so involved in organized activities from dawn to dusk now. Do they ever get to sit on the warm concrete driveway watching for sphinx moths, listening to cicadas, watching fireflies, and eating fresh strawberries dipped in powdered sugar? Do they have to register for a team for competitive watermelon pit-spitting or an enrichment class to learn Bing cherry fence crooning? Does anyone have an old canning jar for catching fireflies?

From the 6/15/70 TIME:

"As an artist grows older," Burchfield explained, "he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child." That was no mean task. His greatness was that, through the alchemy of paint, he was able to restore that childhood wonder for others too. As the [Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, N.Y] Institute's Joseph Trovato put it: "It is not given to any one man to tell the whole story of the world of nature, but Burchfield tells a very important part—a part that touches us all. We will never be able to see the world in the same way again."

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

The Little Squeegy Bug

Set out to find some children's books about fireflies, and found history as well. My students will be making art relating Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting to our current unit on insects.

Last time I was home with my dad, I was entranced by the nightly firefly show in his backyard. The best evening was the third of July. As neighbors were beginning their family firework fun, Dad's backyard became a haven for rabbits. The rabbits and I watched the fireflies, with occasional dramatic back lighting by fireworks, leaving little bunny silhouettes inside my eyelids.

The Little Squeegy Bug was one of my very first books, and perhaps a baby gift. A plain little bug who wanted a stinger, the little squeegy bug received a lantern to hang from his tail instead. The illustrations had a certain mid-century feel that William Joyce reawakened many years later with his The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs.

My childhood book disintegrated decades ago, and I was stunned to see a new book entitled The Little Squeegy Bug at my library. How dare they!! But the author was Bill Martin, Jr., the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, to name just two.

In 1946 two young GIs, Bill Martin, Jr. and his brother Bernard, created the original Little Squeegy Bug as a project for Bernard while he recovered from a war wound. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about the book on September 7, 1946:

Our two little boys came down from the top cottage for supper with me last night and we read a delightful children's book called "Little Squeegy Bug", story of a firefly by Bill and Bernard Martin. The illustrations are just the kind that appeal to children. There is a moral to the tale but it isn't too obvious.

Squeegy is a little "nobody bug" who wants to be like Buzzer, the bumblebee, and carry a gun in his tail. Hunchy, the spider, weaves silver wings so that Squeegy can fly like Buzzer and live at the turn of the road just south of the Moon. But instead of a gun, Hunchy hangs a lantern in Squeegy's tail so that he can be a friend to all the world. Thus he becomes "Squeegy the Firefly, Lamplighter of the Sky."





© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder