picture from my childhood...

[capri0mni]

Perhaps it's because I'm working on a story based on Goodnight Moon, but this afternoon, my mind turned back to a picture that used to hang on my bedroom wall -- one of Edward Hicks' versions of The Peacable Kingdom (he painted about 60 different versions, through his lifetime). On a whim, I wanted to see if I could find the one version that I knew (it's now hanging in Dad's kitchen).

It took a little bit of shuffling through pages, but I did find it, here: Peacable Kingdom, 1845 (though the lefthand side is severely cropped -- the Native Americans in the background are completely cut out of the picture -- boo!). I think that picture had been in my daily view since babyhood, and has shaped my view of what the world is like as much as anything else. So I thought I'd share (more meaningful than a generic quiz meme).

Do you remember what pictures were on your walls as a small child or baby? Do you think any of those pictures still color who you are today?

Comments

[scarfman]

I don't remember any picture that had that kind of influence on me, but my ideal of life was definitely influenced by exposure to Winnie the Pooh at an early age. What life ought to be is waking up in the morning and deciding which friend you're going to visit, and elevensies, and a neighborhood of adventures of no malice and rare actual trauma, and writing something new every day, and birds singing.

When my mother retired some ten or fifteen years ago and found she really enjoyed it, she said, "I've been a latent retired person all my life and didn't know it." I replied, "I know it." I loved high school because I knew then it wouldn't be so good again until retirement.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. Winnie the Pooh was another one of my big influences. When I was a wee thing, I had to go in for orthopedic surgery and ended up in a body cast for several weeks, in the middle of summer. As this was a full generation before videogames, and a dozen children's channels on t.v., adults in my life (mother mother and my paternal grandmother) read aloud to me from Winnie the Pooh

I even nicknamed this house "Sanders" when I moved down here, in homage to Winnie and Piglet, et alia.

And when I get the munchies, I still think of it as "time for elevensies."

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

How funny- that very picture is hanging in the living room at Woolman Hill, where I was this past weekend! It used to hang in the library there, but some time in the past couple of years they moved it.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, Edmund Hicks was a Quaker "minister" (they didn't have any ordained clergy, but he was respected as a speaker when it came to explaining the Friends' tenets), so it's not surprising they'd have one of his paintings, somewhere on the premises...* but to have that version of the painting is rather unusual, I guess...

I always loved the detail in it, and the fact that the grownup were way in the background and the kids and the animals were up front.

*And his elder cousin, Elias Hicks, was leader of a Friends' sect that downplayed the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, and all that. So I'd expect a Quaker retreat that welcomed Pagan gatherings to be rather Hicks-friendly.

[barbarafett.livejournal.com]

My biggest influences on how I see the world were books, too. Specifically, they were Winnie the Pooh, the Borrowers series by Mary Norton, Little House in the Big Woods, and everything by Beverly Cleary. I wish my world were like that.