Sketches: part one

this post is the first in a series of responses to a child's notebook found at the Edmonton Reuse Centre

I'll confess, I'm not exactly sure how to begin. I've set myself the task of writing from these sketches, but I don't know just how to tackle it. I could tell you what I see in this picture - a sun in the top left corner, where every child seems to place the sun. Why is it that the sun belongs in the corner? I couldn't tell you, though I did the same when I was younger. The sun has a darker spot, its rays wisp delicately in the direction of the cloud, as though brushing it away from the summer day spread out below... I could go on, but really, I'd be just giving you what's already there. You can see the butterfly and the tulips - it's not abstract art, it doesn't need interpretation in that basic sense. And as far as children's drawings go, the content of this one is pretty traditional - I myself drew many of the sort. Tulips are a preferable sort of flower - easy to identify, and without the pain of too many individual petals. There's a reason this child didn't choose to draw daisies. 

But why do so many children choose to draw this scene? I'm speaking from my own experience here, as a native Edmontonian - why, when we see snow drifts for more than half of the year, do we draw the tulips, who only appear for a month or two? It's not a phenomenon unique to children, either. I've been searching for poetry about Edmonton, and naturally, a lot of what I've found references the river. It makes sense - the North Saskatchewan is pervasive. But winter is pervasive too, and still, every poem I've read about the river has talked about it as a moving thing. No mention of its winter stasis, or even of the alluring ice blooms that appear as the weather begins to chill in the fall. Maybe I'm just not finding the right poems. But in the middle of the winter, as heartening as a summer picture can be, I think a winter picture is more heartening still. We need more to remind us that winter isn't just something to suffer through - that there's poetry and art in this season as well.

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Between writing and posting this, I came across a bit of poetry that disproves my statement - a stark stanza about the river in icy times. Here it is:

The river runs past us - wearing the debris of snow, in spring.

It pushes ice up its banks with a terrible weight

rips roots from the ground, demolishes bridges,

washes out the footpaths that steal through

the valley like varicose veins.

[from Lisa Martin-Demoor's "City of Champions"] 

 I still stand by the last line that I wrote though - we need more.