I just swept the kitchen floor again. With three young children, that's something we have to do several times a day. As I pulled the crumbs of my family into a neat little pile ready to be scooped up, I noticed an orange crayon in the pile. For a moment I considered leaving in the pile, scooping it up and throwing it out with the rest of the dirt and trash. After all, my kids have crayons everywhere. Will the loss of one orange crayon really matter - or even be noticed?

But then, I've never been able to throw away a perfectly good crayon. I thought about my kids - how if you give them one piece of paper and a single crayon, they are pulled in by the tractor-beam of a new work of art waiting to emerge from the blank whiteness of the page. Who knows what they could create with this one orange crayon? Houses, family portraits, dragons, monsters, favorite cartoon characters... I thought about my own history of mark-making - of how for as long as I can remember I've been unable to resist taking a crayon, pencil, pen, anything, and drawing whatever comes to mind. (Admission: At restaurants I draw with the kid crayons on the napkins as much as my kids do). So I retrieved the crayon from the pile and set it on the counter - ready and waiting for it's next creation.

It's true: Entire worlds exist in a single crayon.