I never thought much about painting before.
To me, the world was already full—full of smells, sounds, warmth, and the soft hum of life. Why would anyone want to stop and trap it all in colors on a piece of wood or cloth?
But today, Ma surprised me.
She came home carrying a small box filled with powders—red, yellow, blue—and sticks with soft ends that looked like the tails of birds.
"I found these with the traveling peddler," she said, setting the box on the table like it was a treasure chest. "They're called paints."
Pa scratched his head and grunted something about wasting good flour on colors.
Ma ignored him. "You're going to learn to paint, Ember."
I looked at her, then at the paints, then back at her. "Why?"
"Because," she smiled, "sometimes, words and memories aren't enough. Sometimes you want to catch a moment so it never slips away."
I thought about that for a long time.
The first try was messy.
I dipped the stick into the red paint and pressed it to the cloth Ma gave me. The color spread like spilled berries.
It didn't look like anything at first—just a blotch.
Ma came to my side and showed me how to hold the stick more gently, how to mix the colors, how to think about the shapes in front of me.
"Look outside," she said. "See the sky? It's not just blue—it's a hundred blues. And the clouds? They aren't just white—they hold shadow and light. Try to catch that."
So I looked.
I saw the pale pink morning sky stretching over the wheat field, the way the sunlight made the dew on grass sparkle like tiny jewels, the crooked branches of the old elm tree near the river.
I tried to paint the sky first. Soft strokes of blue, dabbed with white, mixed with a hint of gray. It wasn't perfect. The cloth wasn't smooth like the sky. The colors ran where I didn't want them.
But when I finished, I stepped back and smiled.
It looked like a piece of the morning.
Pa came to look over my shoulder.
He grunted, then said, "Looks like a storm to me."
Ma laughed. "No, that's sunrise, silly."
Pa squinted. "Ah, well. Close enough."
Later, I sat by the riverbank, paints and cloth spread beside me, trying to catch the way the water twisted and shined in the afternoon sun.
It was harder than it looked.
Sometimes the colors muddled into one another. Sometimes my hand shook, and the lines weren't smooth. Sometimes I gave up and just stared.
But slowly, I learned to see differently.
Not just the thing itself, but the feeling it gave me—the cold touch of the breeze, the laughter of a bird far away, the quiet peace of time passing.
Painting wasn't just about making pictures. It was about holding moments so they wouldn't vanish.
That evening, Ma hung my cloths around the hearth to dry.
Pa whistled low and said, "You've got the eye of a true farmer—patient and careful."
I grinned. Maybe painting and farming weren't so different after all.
Before I went to bed, I touched the dried cloth again, feeling the roughness of the paint.
I thought about how, even without magic, without swords or glory, I could still make something lasting.
Maybe that was my kind of magic.