Not that she’d be everybody’s idea of a fairytale princess. Her face was square and strong-jawed, not heart-shaped and dimpled like the heroines of the fairy tales in the illustrated Grimm’s my oma brought over from the old country. Her hair was brown—nut brown, I called it to myself—not the spun gold flax of Rapunzel. And she was tall, more like a Valkyrie or an Amazon than Cinderella or Rose Red. But as the light from the studio windows fell on her, I recognized her as the heroine of my stories—the ones I had been telling and drawing as long as I could remember. Instead of being surprised, I remember thinking that it made sense I would find her here. After all, it was my storytelling and drawing that had led me to the Art Students League in New York City in the fall of 1927. I grew up on a dairy farm in Delaware County, New York, in the town of Roxbury, the eldest of five girls. Because my mother was needed to help with the milking, it fell to me to watch the younger ones while doing my chores.
