That's My Boy

The boy sits on the floor. He has a pastel stick in his small right hand and he has just returned from playing at a friend's house. His friend's parents are artists too. The daddy is a painter and the mummy a sculptor. They make things. They have tolerant, interesting, open minds. As I write I can hear the paper the boy is using slide across the shiny bare wooden floorboards. I can also hear the pastel stick slide like a mushy skater across the surface of the paper. It is the sound of childhood and rain. Another sound I can hear is the firm prodding of the boy's mother's, the artist's, pastel stick, against the surface of her piece, of the boy's cousin, the artist's niece. I pick up a washed green grape from the plate with the painted illustration of the children that the artist designed and pop it in my mouth. Suddenly, as I chew, the boy is no longer sitting on the floor. He is standing beside me, alert, ready, with the flowerpot his friend's father gave us with several sunflower cuttings already growing in it. He wants me to plant them in the garden. He wants to do this now. Two hours later, we are still in the garden and the sunflowers are all planted and we have weeded four wheelbarrows of weeds. This time it is something else he wants. He wants the artist's no longer used sketching board from the shed. And now he is working on it with his pastel stick in his small right hand again. Circles. We would be square without them.