The Generational Crayon Bin
Touchpoints to Creative Connections
My fingers dove into the crayon bin, feeling sure I would find black. I cast aside the burnt sienna, maroon, maize, teal blue, red violet, and blue. Why was there always so much blue? How many skies, oceans, and butterflies could anyone color in? I brought the container to the living room floor to sift through as the smell of musty wax permeated the air. My mind drifted back to my childhood.
I was sitting on the classroom floor of my afterschool facility alongside my best friend, Kimberly. We were sifting through a similar container and separating the crayons into categories — warm reds and purples in one pile, cool blues and greens in another. Kimberly’s favorite color was yellow, and it looked like she was quietly moving all the yellows into her own special pile.
“How many crayons do we need to make a candle?” I asked.
“Umm. The teacher said it depends on how big you want the candle to be. Did you cut a wick already? Cause you don’t want anything too big to stick out of the styrofoam coffee cup.” Kimberly was good at listening to the teacher’s directions, or maybe she was better at focusing.
“I want a humongous pink and purple candle. So, I’m gonna fill the entire cup, and yeah, I already cut a long wick.”
Kimberly eyed me, peeling the wrappers off the crayons. Most had Crayola wrappers, but I threw anything in with a colorful, waxy feel. Sometimes, those wrappers were branded with names like Prang, Penway, and Woolworth. I could feel little bits of wax getting trapped under my nails. It felt good to make headway at using the broken crayons for something useful. Most days we used the pencil sharpener to create rosettes and heaps of crayon shavings that ended up getting tossed.
Music played on the radio while I sang along, oblivious that I had peeled off more wrappers than I needed for my candle. “Ebony and Ivory… living together in perfect harmony…Side by side on my piano keyboard…oh Lord, why don’t we?” I zoned out in my happy place, unclear what the next step of the process would be.
“Earth to June. You have more than enough for two candles. Why don’t we stop here for today?” A teacher’s voice of reason interrupted my tune.
I noticed that Kimberly was now standing next to the soup pot we used to melt crayons. “For today? Umm, can’t we melt them today? I wanted to take it home. Kimberly is ready, too. I’ll even go second.” Offering not to be first in line was weird; it felt like maybe my turn wouldn’t come, and once I got started with a project, I wanted to finish it.
“All right. You can each do one candle today.”
I scooped up my pile of pink and purple candles in my tee shirt and ran to stand next to Kimberly, unaware I had more reds than pinks. I leaned over a white styrofoam cup to empty the crayons before my teacher changed her mind. The overfill I stuffed into my purple pants pockets. “This is gonna be so pretty. Are you gonna take yours home today?”
“Maybe if it cools down before my mom picks me up.” Kimberly emptied her cup of yellow crayons into the pot and smoothed her bangs across her forehead while the teacher turned on the heat. Kimberly stared at the pot, awaiting the liquid gold that would become her candle. A malodorous smell permeated the air — somewhere between musty paint and overheated plastic chemicals.
I stuck my tongue out of the side of my mouth. “Oh, yeah, right. Me too, but I think it’s totally gonna.”
When my time came, I dumped my coffee cup of crayons into the pot that still had some yellow wax stuck to the sides. The teacher once again turned the heat on a hot plate. I shrieked with glee as the crayons began to melt into a colorful liquid soup. The little pieces disappeared first, and before I knew it, the entire pot was reddish-purple, much more red than I expected. The teacher poured the hot wax into the cup around the piece of rope I had cut. “Kimberly, can you hold my wick for a sec? I’ll be right back!”
I ran over to the blue and green crayons pile and dumped them into my shirt. Then, I ran back to the teacher, who was talking to Kimberly while she held onto both her wick and mine. “Can we do another one?”
“Remember June. I said one today.”
I frowned and stuffed pieces of other crayons into my pockets. “Fine. I’ll do the rest at home. My dad can help me ’cause he’s an artist who knows how to do really cool projects.” I thought about convincing my dad to help me create a rainbow candle using these crayons and others from my crayon bin. It would take much convincing to rouse him from his bed, but maybe an art project would bring us together.
As I drifted back to the current day, middle-aged me saw the bits of unwrapped crayons that never became part of a candle. I thought of all the unused art supplies Dad had never used as my adult daughter appeared by my side.
“Mom, are you going to use my crayons? Remember that bin isn’t just yours. The sparkly ones are mine from the 90s, and I think I had some that smell.”
As I continued to sift, I didn’t look up at her. “It’s not like you’re going to use any of them. And, besides — this has my crayons plus those from when you were little. I even added stuff from your brother’s childhood. So, it’s like diving through three generations of crayons. Over the years, I found new boxes of Crayola crayons irresistible, especially the sixty-four count.” I closed my eyes and imagined flipping open the quintessential yellow and green box with its perfectly sharpened crayons.
“Yeah, every time we were in a store with Crayola, you let me get a fresh box. Do you know which ones are yours?”
I looked up at her. “Yeah. At least for the Crayola ones, the paper is different. See?” I held up the stub of an orange-red crayon. “I don’t even think they make this color anymore.”
“They do smell. What are you even using them for?”
Before resuming my search, I made a few test scribbles with crayons which looked black. “Remember when you were little, when we would make a patchwork design with lots of different crayon colors? We’d then color on top of it with a black crayon and finally scratch an image into the black so that it would reveal all the underlying colors. I thought it would be fun for Grandma’s Mother’s Day card. And, yes, I know I’m late, and we need to get on the road.”
“Of course, I remember. All of the little bits of crayon would get everywhere. It’s even messier than glitter, which you banned.”
“Yeah, but it was so pretty. That’s what I’m doing, but it’s hard to find the black crayons because I dumped everything in, sometimes just bits of crayons without wrappers. There are even these little Columbia House stamps with the names of movies on them. I was so busy when you were little that I guess I didn’t pay attention to what went where.”
“Or maybe we were using them for a project?” She laughed. “Mom, you always had time for an art project.”
“Yeah. It was important to me because I wanted you to know that you mattered.” I paused and let the gulp in the back of my throat settle. “I wanted to do things differently than my parents.”
“I know, Mom.”
My teenage son’s bedroom door opened, and he traipsed over to where I was sifting. “Crayons, really? You know you can use markers.”
“Yeah, I’m aware we have lots of different art supplies, but there’s something special about crayons. Call it nostalgia if you want, but I like using them.”
He crinkled his nose. “Uh-huh. The living room smells. Tell me you can’t smell that.”
“That’s what I said,” my daughter intoned.
“But doesn’t it remind you guys of anything?”
“A kindergarten class?” he laughed. “Or that time you mentioned a crayon called asparagus!”
“That’s a green color. I meant possibility. All the colors of the rainbow are here, and it reminds me of all the projects I used to do. Some of them with you two. I even found little bits of chalk from when we used to do sidewalk art. Remember that? And remember when we’d make leaf rubbings? Anyway, I’ll be done in a minute, and then we can go.”
I glanced up and saw my daughter still looking at me. “Seriously, Mom. What are you going to do with all of these crayons now that we’re not kids anymore? You’ve donated almost everything else.”
“Not everything. Besides, I keep thinking about how I’ll figure out how to do more projects in the future. I guess there’s always that hope one of you will want to create again.” I looked up at my children, who towered over me, and realized their passions were elsewhere. “Or, maybe I’ll shlep the crayons down to Kimberly’s house, and we’ll make candles.”
