Mandala elephant on the thigh

The mooring at Braunston is full of ducks and no sense, and I have been staying up nights with the lamp and Grandad's tin of nibs, trying to get an elephant out of my head and onto paper. You will laugh. I have drawn it forty times. Every version came out looking like a pincushion. The trouble is the ears. Grandad always said an elephant's ears are a map of wherever it has been, so I kept filling them with rings and scallops until the paper gave up.

Mrs Okonedo at the lock keeper's cottage asked to see the drawings yesterday. She had a book of her mother's embroidery from Lagos, and she laid it beside mine and said the lines were the same kind of patience. I did not know what to say. She tapped the trunk, where I had packed a little rosette like a sun seen through a tent flap, and said that was the bit she would stitch first.

So I have decided. The elephant goes on the tiller board, black on white, every ornament a small job of its own. It will take me the winter. Tom says I am mad to spend a whole season on a boat sign when the coal money is short, but he came round when I showed him the dotted fills, which I have done with the tip of a darning needle, one dot at a time, the way the rain comes down the cut in March.

Write back and tell me if the mandala on the trunk is too busy. I think it is exactly busy enough.

Your loving sister, Ada