November 13, 2025

First-Grade Beauty

For two years, beginning when I was four years old, I wore a patch over my good left eye to force my crooked right eye to mature and hopefully straighten itself out to avoid very expensive corrective eye surgery. It wasn’t easy. A kid with a patch over one eye is the target for all sorts of school yard taunting, i.e., “Hey, Pirate Sharie!” or “Look out, here comes Dead Eye!” or worst of all, being picked last to join a Red Rover team.

My fifth birthday in June 1958.

The patch remedy did not work and during the summer of 1959, I had surgery to straighten my crooked right eye. Because a child’s eye matures during the first five years of a child’s life, such surgeries need to occur before the age of five which meant that although the eye was now straight, it had not matured. For the rest of my life, I would have only one good eye. Would it have any immediate impact on my “art”?

Not really.

My mother wrote on the back of this drawing: “By Sharie, Sept. 9, 1959, 1st day of school, 1st Grade, Teacher — Mrs. Wood“. This appears to be a drawing of a picnic in my mother’s backyard, embellished with the backyard apple trees and birds. I assume that my mother is the figure on the left and me with a very bad sunburn on the right. I still drew faces as circles and limbs as straight lines which was typical of kids my age.

Seven months later, I was seeing my world in a more developed way.

In March 1960, I did a drawing of my mother’s home in winter with me looking out the window as my mother (on the left — labeled, “Mommy” by my mother) and my father (on the right — labeled, “Daddy”) shoveled snow. Their faces were now profiles and their limbs more fleshed out.

Four months later, on the last day of First Grade — June 10, 1960 — I did this drawing of my mother’s house.

The sky is now everywhere and not just a blue strip at the top of the page. It also appears that I discovered color — lots of it. On the right is my mother at her backyard bird bath, again more fully fleshed out. I love that the bird bath was an important detail to me.

So . . . it appears that bad eyesight really had no impact on how I saw the world when I was kid. My mother must have seen that, too, as she did not save any of my art papers beyond First Grade. So why have I spent so much time looking for clues about whether I was born to appreciate beauty? Outside of my eye surgery, no particularly significant experiences emerge. Did the process of appreciating beauty occur without me being aware of it? According to Tony Eaude, in his article, “Reflections on How Young Children Develop a Sense of Beauty” (Taylor & Francis, online 8/4/23), “A child’s sense of beauty may lie dormant and not emerge for years . . . an experience or an image may remain from early childhood, though the child may not see or articulate it as beautiful at the time.”

Based on what I remember as a kid, I don’t think my embedded sense of beauty resulted from a sudden epiphany, but rather from a more gradual process of exploring and remembering significant experiences. What were those experiences for me? What did I see — what could I see — that I considered beautiful? I’ll continue to explore the answer to these questions and others in the weeks ahead.

13 Comments

    • Thank you, Neola. Truth be told, I’m kinda exploring this beauty question rather blindly (and ironically, given my eye defect). I’m not certain where this exploration is headed. Yesterday, Charlotte posted a comment which wondered if my search for beauty was connected to something “missing” in my life. Such an intriguing thought! I’m pondering it.

  • How intriguing that your Mother saved all those drawings. What does that mean? And what does it mean for you?

    • Charlotte — I believe my mother was concerned about my eyesight and my drawings were a gauge for her. When it seemed like my having just one good eye had little impact on what I was drawing, she stopped saving the drawings. By that time, I was also reading anything I could lay my hands on which was also an indication that my one good eye was good enough.

      • My drawings, by the way, do illustrate the progression of how a child sees the world. Pre-school, humans are drawn as “tadpoles” (term according to child development experts) with stick arms and legs coming out of a circle which is the head. Then the child progresses to drawing a circle head and a triangle body with stick arms and legs and then . . . well, just look at my drawings.

  • Thank you for sharing the evolution of art and the cultivation of beauty in your life. Do you suppose that your vision challenges caused you to look at the world more closely and to notice the beauty which so many others pass by? You notice intimate details about people, too, which makes you an excellent interviewer and friend, asking about a piece of jewelry or something else, to draw out the story.

    In my mother’s obituary, we led with “She loved beauty…” and she did, in the garden, in art, music etc. She supported the arts and encouraged all of us with music, art and dance lessons. What about your mother and beauty? I could not help but notice the gorgeous birthday cakes at both 3 and 5 years old. Did your mother make those cakes for all of you? That is both a labor of love and a creative act.

    I learned to appreciate and create beauty on my own, but am sure that I was influenced by my mother’s appreciation of it, too.

    • You are welcome, Beth. I’m intrigued by your connecting my vision with my ability to look at the world more closely which has impacted my interviewing skills. Yes, I am a good interviewer, but never thought about it in terms of “seeing” and “noticing.”

      And in terms of my mother, you are a couple of steps ahead of me! The more I’ve looked through old photographs, the more I’ve noticed her gorgeous birthday cakes that she made for each of her daughters every year. Just yesterday I began to make a list of how she brought her idea of beauty to her house — the list is long! And in upcoming posts about me and beauty, I plan to weave in more of her influence.

  • As I sat down to respond, I read Beth’s comments and realized that she had asked exactly what I wanted to ask after I read this post earlier. Seems so very likely to me that your greater awareness of your eyes may well have helped you to be more aware of the gift of seeing and more aware of noticing details. What for most children was a “taken for granted” was for you a constant challenge, but enabled you to really see things most children might overlook. A gift wrapped in that crooked right eye?

  • Got an Emily Dickinson quote on a tea bag yesterday that seemed relevant to this post:

    “Beauty is not caused. It is.”

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