Hello, ladies!
Now that one of you has turned 10, I thought I’d try to write once in a while to get to know you better. Having reached the advanced age of 38 myself, I’m not totally sure what young ladies talk about, so you’ll have to write back and tell me what’s interesting to you, and what’s going on in your lives.
I don’t think details about my job would be very interesting to you (I work in finance for an oil company, so spend most of my day trying to understand how the decisions other people make – mostly the ones about what to make, and when or how to make it - will impact the amount of money the company I work for has, or sometimes, when I’m lucky, helping them make those decisions). That takes up most of my time every week, but it’s not really very interesting.
When I was you age, Eva, I wanted to be an astronaut or a princess, and when I was your age, Shannon, I wanted to be a lawyer or a ninja. I still think being an astronaut might be kind of cool (but I’d miss your Uncle Patrick too much to go to space), and I don’t think being a lawyer would be too much fun anymore – you have to know a LOT of uninteresting things to do well at that….and I will always want to be both a princess and a ninja. I hope that maybe some days I am a little bit of both of those things. :)
What I really love most of all is art. I love to paint things and make things and look at beautiful things other people have made. So maybe I can tell you some stuff about that. I don’t know a lot, but I know what I like!
So, for this letter, here is a picture of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”. It was painted in 1889, but even all this time later is probably one of the best known paintings in the world. It’s what’s called an impressionist painting – which I think means it doesn’t look much like a photograph of the real world, but you can look at it and see impressions or interpretations of things that exist in the real world; you can still tell that it’s hills and trees and a town and the stars in the sky, even though the real things don’t really look like that. I saw it in real life when it was on tour in the Chicago Art Museum (Gram-E and Gramp-E took me), and it is crazy beautiful.
The little town in the painting is a village in France called Saint Remy; someday I want to go there and see the night sky and the trees – I’m sure the city looks very different all these years later, but I think it would be cool to see the place where Van Gogh was looking when he thought of doing this painting. I’ve tried a lot of times to paint like this, but even though it kind of looks like it might be easy to do, it’s actually incredibly hard & takes a tremendous amount of effort and planning and I’ve never been able to even come close to doing something that looks like this.
So that’s all – I’ll try to write again soon! Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome!
Hugs and kisses,
Auntie Paula
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