Happy Accident

The summer that I was eleven, I rode my bike to town once a week and took art lessons from my great grandmother, with a skinny boy who was a year older than me whom my great grandmother really liked.  He came to visit her a lot.  I was terrible at drawing and painting, although I enjoyed it a lot, and I did learn about the depth of shading and how to draw an excellent tree (which remains the only thing that I can actually draw to this day).  

Painting on canvas board with acrylic paint in my great grandmother's living room each Wednesday afternoon that summer is now a good memory for me, and I'm glad my mother encouraged me to do it. There has been one big statement that my wise and spunky great grandmother said one afternoon at art lessons that has stuck with me, and I've often thought of it throughout the years since.  I was painting a tree, as usual, because that's the only thing I could actually make, when a blob of paint slipped and ended up in a strange spot on the canvas.  I was pretty frustrated with myself, but my short and lively great grandmother practically jumped up off her stool, and exclaimed, "That's a happy accident!"  She went on about how that happened to her all the time, and you just had to look at the blob with the right eyes and turn it into something else you hadn't planned on putting in the painting in the first place.  She was so excited, and declared that that's what made painting, and life in general for that matter, exciting.

This photograph was one of those happy accidents.  Greg turned at the wrong time, and the sun caught the lens in a way that made parts of the picture overexposed.  I almost instantly deleted it from the camera when I realized he had turned, but I kept it.  It wasn't until I put it onto the computer that I realized I had a happy accident on my hands.  I couldn't have gotten that kind of sunflare from that angle if I had tried all day.  It's way better that the image I set out to take.  

By the way, my wonderful husband has been getting up almost every morning to help make me and dispense breakfast, as well as pack Sarah's school lunch.  It has made my morning scramble so much better.