Sunny side up

"Here, now draw the sun up there in the corner," she said, handing me the goldenrod crayon. I obediently drew a curved line around the top right hand corner of my drawing and colored it in, checking to make sure Mrs. Reno approved. Next, I drew goldenrod and burnt orange rays coming out of the sun and made sure there were dimples at either end of my smiling face just below.


Why is the sun always yellow in children's pictures? Back in my Crayola days, I know I had never seen a yellow sun. In fact, from what I'd seen at the time it seemed to be white or light blue...and sometimes red, but I was sure I'd never seen it look yellow. Most of the time, it just seemed colorless, actually. It was the clouds that were so pretty (and why did clouds always have to be white?).

That yellow sun didin't fade away in gradeschool...or high school. In fact, do we not all think of yellow when we hear "sunshine" and the aptly named "sunflower"? Perhaps there is something I don't know about light and refraction and all those other physics terms that I am pretty sure my allergy medicine made me sleep through. If I were to paint a picture now, I think I might make my sunshine orange and blue and white and purple and red. That's when it looks the best. Sunsets in Michigan confirm that. See, a yellow sun is not only simple and inaccurate, but it limits our ideals. How unfortunate to think that a perfect sunny day would merely be yellow...pardon, goldenrod (a rather nasty autumn weed, no less). And think of the limits we place on the imagination by insisting that perfection be measured so one-dimmensionally. Even then I insisted on adding orange.

For years I've been certain that we were duped by kindergarten instructors. Sky = blue. Sun = Yellow. Tree = Green. But the other morning on my way to work in the early light, I saw a yellow sun. I saw the sun that inspires preschool teachers everywhere to pull out the yellow hued crayon for little girls everyday and demonstrate the best way to draw the sunshine in the top right hand corner of her picture. But it wasn't yellow or goldenrod. It was every shade yellow, several shades of brown and cream and gray. It was beautiful and glorious at that sleepy hour of the day. But it sure isn't something you can find in a Crayola box...even the 64 pack with a sharpener.