It's Not JUST Sand Art!

I think my blogging muscles are rusty. Fortunately, I have Trumbull Day to talk about. Specifically Sand Art.

When I was younger I had ALWAYS wanted to do Sand Art when I saw it at fairs, but my mom wouldn't let me because it was too messy (and can you blame her? I mean, who in their right mind lets little kids put sand in a jar that's held shut with only a cork, and take it home. It's a mess waiting to happen.) But, I am grown up now (sort of) and last night, at Trumbull Day, I made my first piece of Sand Art. You make sand art by pouring different colors of sand in a little jar. It creates layers, and then you pack it in really tight, and the layers stay put and don't shift. It looks kind of like tye-dye, only in a little decorative bottle, and out of sand. I kind of thought it would be a fun, quick little thing to do at the fair; one of those things I swore to myself as a child I would do one day as an adult (like when I was six and I vowed that one day, I would eat an entire bowl of mashed potatoes for dinner). About half way, through, I realized I was REALLY thinking about my color choices, and coming up with crazy ways to angle the funnel so that the sand would pile exactly the way I wanted it to in the bottle. I developed a technique for tapping the bottle so that it would settle just right and when I made a mistake, I would get upset.

I looked up at the guy who was running it and said, "Man, I'm starting to take this whole sand art thing way too seriously!"

He laughed and said, "Oh! You can't take Sand Art seriously enough!"

"It's very Zen." I told him, and he said, "Actually, you're right."

He explained to me the religious origins of Sand Art, how Tibetan monks would create sand art on a hill top some place using tiny piles of colored sand.

"It was like," he explained, "a gigantic pointilism picture made out of sand. Then they would leave it there and the wind would come..." and here, he paused dramatically, gently swept his arms in a huge circle, and practically whispered, "...and take it away without anyone ever seeing it. It was art just for God."

"Wow!" I said, and I really meant it.

"Yeah." He said, and he nodded.

Thus, this slightly nutty girl bonded with the slightly nutty guy at the Sand Art booth.

The fireworks this year were amazing, too; so good, in fact, that I put my popcorn bucket on my head.