I don’t remember learning my name, or the first word I spoke, or the first time I walked. But I remember this.

I am in diapers on Scarborough Beach in Rhode Island, small enough that the sky still feels too big for me. My mother Hazel and my Aunt Shirley have spread a blanket on the sand, and the ocean breathes in and out like something alive. I crawl down off the blanket and onto the warm sand, and that’s when I notice it — the way my little hands and knees leave lines when I move.

Lines. Soft ridges. A record of where I’ve been.

I begin to crawl just to watch the marks appear. Curve left — the lines curve left. Swing right — they follow me. Soon I am lost inside the rhythm of it, this small miracle of cause and effect. I am making something. The world is responding. There is no language yet for flow, or imagination, or creation — only this quiet astonishment that I can move through the world and the world will answer back.

I don’t know how long I crawl like that. In my memory it goes on forever: my eyes down, my mind floating, the sea whispering its old stories nearby. And then, without meaning to, I stop. I sit back in the sand.

And I look up.

The blanket is gone.

My mother is gone.

My aunt is gone.

The beach is wider than it was a moment ago, and the sky is enormous, and there is no one here who belongs to me. A thin thread snaps inside my chest. The air turns sharp. I open my mouth and the sound that comes out is raw and ancient, the sound every child makes the first time the world feels too big.

I am screaming for my mother and she is nowhere.

And then — she is.

It is my aunt who reaches me first, running across the sand, scooping me up, pressing me into the safe harbor of her body. My small world closes again. The sky shrinks. The fear drains away. I am held.

Years later, I will look back at this moment and understand why it stayed with me when so much else did not. This was my first act of creation — and my first lesson in how easily wonder can carry you beyond the edges of what you know. It was also my first lesson in being found.

If my life has a pattern, it begins here: I follow a line of curiosity into the distance. I forget the world. I lose sight of the familiar shore. And just when the fear arrives — someone who loves me calls my name and brings me home.

People ask when I became an artist.

I think it started that day, on my hands and knees in the sand, learning that I could make marks in the world — and that sometimes the world would erase them, and sometimes it would carry me farther than I meant to go, but love would still come running.