The book was almost too large for her little hands to carry across the room to the vast wooden desk where her mother worked. There she smoothed out the pages in front of her and carefully traced the curves of the blue ink scrawled across the page as her whole body ached to understand what it said and how to create such beauty.

Looking inside the drawer, she found a pen and she clumsily ripped out a page at the back of the book. Her hand flew across the page creating little loops and oversized loops and occasionally breaking the lines to mimic the pages still set out in front of her.

“Mommy!” she yelled as she ran toward her mother. She thrust up the sheet of paper with scribbles across it. “I wrote just like you!” she said with a toothless grin.