A child’s drawing

Prompt: write from a line from the poem “The Blue House” by Tomas Tranströmer.

1972. My mother sits at her drawing table. She is wearing blue shirt and blue jeans. I stand next to her and peek over her shoulder. She looks up at me and smiles. She is working in ink. Dipping her pen into an ink jar, she gently taps it, and slowly moves it over to a large piece of illustration board. Through tiny lines, swooping circles, and dots, she creates flowers, leaves, and stems with animals growing out from them. I am mesmerized. I stare at her drawing and wonder how she makes the cats look so surreal and real at the same time. 

My father is downstairs in the living room drawing in a sketchpad. He is working in pencil. He sits on the green corduroy couch, wearing brown corduroy pants. He smiles at me as I sit down next to him. He keeps looking up from the sketchpad toward the other side of the living room then back down at the paper. His sketch, though done rather quickly, captures just what I see when I look across the room. I wonder how he can recreate what he sees so well. 

Inspired, I jump up and go into the kitchen. Grabbing some paper and a pencil I sit down to draw. I feel excited and defeated. I am 7 years old. My drawings are always a child’s drawing. I can’t capture what I see like my dad can. I can’t draw a cat like my mother can. I stare at the blank white paper and wonder if I will ever be able to draw as well as my parents.