Caterpillar

I remember the confusion between brand names (Kleenex, Joy) and their bland counterparts (tissue, dish soap). It worked both ways, too. When ordinary things were also the brand name for something specific, I would wonder how they were related. What does a slowly moving creature with a lot of legs have to do with a bulldozer pushing dirt out of the way? When I was the boys' age (now 5, I really need to update this blog page), Caterpillar was both the most popular brand of dirt moving machinery and a sometimes furry creature that fascinated me as it crawled across sticks during its short life before it became something completely different. The dirt moving company is still around, but there has been enough competition (John Deere, Kobota) that we don't refer to every digger as a "Caterpillar".

So it wasn't a matter of confusing word meaning when Dietrich began making road ways on his painting of what was "supposed" to be a caterpillar. At a park this morning a florescent green caterpillar found its way to the strap of my handbag which was hanging off of a bench. When I put it there, I consciously made the strap shorter so that the pesky ants would have to work harder to get to the raisins that were inside. Instead, the caterpillar fell out of the tree and landed there, or somehow navigated the bench leg to get to the bag, and caught us all by surprise. A few kids came over to watch it crawl, slowly. We noticed its yellow stripes had a speck of purple at the tip, and that it had three tinier "arms" that must be for eating. I suggested that we remember what it looks like and when we go home, we could paint what we remember -- the colors, the stripes, the little arms. It took us two sticks and a weed (as Dietrich helped me remember tonight) to get the caterpillar off the bag and back into a tree. Then we were on our way.

We mixed up as close to florescent green as we could come. Elliott's patience was about at its end, so he quickly made a head, a body, and six legs, all green. Dietrich began making lines, globs, and square dots. I asked him what he remembered about the caterpillar, but he was clearly more interested in how the paint was getting on the brush, then on the paper, then being transformed on the paper by what he did with the brush, than in recreating the creature we saw. I pestered him a few more times, but then let it go. He was making roads. He laid the paint on think, then thinned it out, as a roller would do. He then took the black and put another layer on, the whole time explaining how roads are constructed. He watched as the smooth glob of paint became a stripe with tiny lines from the sponge brush. He covered the paper in roads before declaring he was all done.

On our table, all dried from sitting in the sun, is a small painting clearly of a caterpillar stuck on something black (my rendition). There is another painting of a huge caterpillar with a few stripes. And there is a series of roads, with a caterpillar hidden at the bottom.