Crayon Characters

"It's so quiet." Luna says to me.

"Yes, it is." I respond.

It's just her and I here at home.  She's working on a Kindergarten workbook while sitting at the dining room table with me.  At the center of the glass table, a sandalwood scented candle is lit.
Warm notes of vanilla and musk collide with the sandalwood and waft in the air.

I look at her, her little hands, her perfectly clean nails, the way she carefully grips the pencil in her right hand.  She loves to write.  She's practicing her alphabet.  She's writing the letter 'P' over and over and over again.

Luna's energy and presence is ethereal to me.        

Her box of crayons sits opened in front of her thick workbook.  She's just taken a three minute break and ate a small bowl of vanilla goat yogurt I recently served her.

Luna choosing

The silence in the house is meditative.  Luna begins to softly hum the tune to a 1920's song off of a CD I purchased at Starbuck's some months back called, 'Speak Easy.'

She loves music.  Lyrics stick to her mind like molasses.

She often hums a tune or sings a random lyric she's made up when she's focused.  Her methodical inclinations and disciplined nature remind me of her grandfather, Oscar.  I think she gets these two qualities from him.  My husband and I have agreed on this.  

I admire this quality in both my daughter and father-in-law.

I get up and walk toward our book shelf.  It's a fourteen foot wide freestanding bookshelf brimming with books.  The right side belongs to my husband.  The left side, mine.  This arrangement just happened this way.

Our  books

I'm looking for a writing reference book.

"I like the silence, mama."

"Yes, me too!"

"Silence is peace." She adds.

I smile as I run my index finger across the spines of the books, reading the titles with my head cocked to the left, 'Write is a Verb', 'Hooked', 'Plot & Structure', 'Character Traits', 'Dialogue', 'How to write a book proposal.'

"I agree." I respond back.

I walk back empty-handed to my chair at the dining room table.  Luna is choosing the next crayon to color her picture of a rocket ship with.

"This orange looks a little red, right mama?" She says as she raises the crayon for me to see it.

"Kind of.  It's like a burnt orange." I tell her.

I watch her color her picture.  The back and forth strokes of the crayon to paper sounds like the sweeping of cement, subtle and deliberate.

How easy it looks to color a page?  You choose a crayon, your crayon kisses the page and a color appears.

My thoughts remind me of my novel characters.  They sit quietly.  Waiting.  Sometimes, my characters are like crayons you'd select from a box.  Most of the time, they select me and then I must color my writing canvas with the colors of their world.

Still, I sit and watch my Luna color her page in perfect silence.  She IS peace.