She was fourteen months old. I was at the kitchen board, updating the week's list, and she toddled over and grabbed the marker out of my hand before I could stop her. She turned to the board and drew a line. Not a shape, just a line — left to right across the lower half, as far as she could reach.
Then she looked at me with the marker still in her hand, waiting.
I drew a circle next to her line. She drew another line. I drew a dot inside the circle. She pressed the marker against the board and made a thick black square. We did this for maybe an hour, taking turns, no agenda, just filling the board with shapes. She thought it was a game. She wasn't wrong.
When my wife came into the kitchen and saw the board, she stopped and looked at it for a while. The week's list was buried under about thirty shapes. She didn't seem to mind.
That board has been through a lot since then. Grocery lists, incident timelines, meeting prep, arguments about whose turn it is to do things, birthday planning, late-night thoughts I didn't want to lose. My daughter has added to it many times since, not just lines now but things she says are specific things — a house, a dog, a version of me with a very large head.
I like that the board holds all of this without distinction. The incident timeline and the large-headed drawing are equivalent in terms of what they require: a surface, a marker, some space to think or play. I've come to believe those things are not as different as they appear.