The canvas panel lays before me, blank and pristine.
Or almost pristine. Scuff marked and yellow tinged;  
it's been sitting around for a while.

A horizontal penciled line, not quite centered.
Top portion is the sky. 
Paint it blue, I’m told.

But skies aren’t out-of-the-tube blue on flat canvas.
They’re deep, dappled with clouds sometimes,
softened by invisible breezes at other times.
Troubled by storms, 
subdued by dawn’s tentative tendrils. 
That all comes later, I’m told.

I dab at the blue mound on waxed paper.
Oil or acrylic, I don’t recall.

Mom sits nearby, chatting with her friend
who is -- ostensibly -- here to teach me art.
They gossip – well, the friend does.
Mom listens, jokes, commiserates. Passes judgment.

A large book lies open on the table,
showing step-by-step how to recreate the painting:
an old barn on a rutted dirt road alongside a 
generic, leafless tree. 

Sketch the outlines as illustrated, I'm told.
I don’t want to. 
This is someone else's painting, not mine. 
I don’t know what the barn has seen,
what the tree has felt.

Who traversed the road to carve the ruts,
Where were they headed? 
What did they find upon arrival? 

I put lines on the canvas with a #2 pencil. 
That’s enough for tonight, I’m told.
My mom and her friend barely glance at my work,
make vague plans for a return visit. 
The friend leaves.

The half-blue, scuffed canvas sits on the floor 
in a dark corner of my bedroom closet.
For years. 

When I am forty, I paint skunk cabbage.

It’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo)!

Day Two prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: “write [a] poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”