Tell the Story in Color, Start With Red
By: Trisha Traughber
Tags: Art, Poetry, Scribe, Fiction, Colors

Don’t they know? This is their last run for a long time in these woods, their last chance to meet friends, or anyone else. The lasts are rustling from the trees, drifting and whispering underfoot.

The children are running loops and spirals around us sometimes bursting through a lingering stroke of yellow, at other times, melting into the crimson background. At times I guess by the padded rhythm of their feet that they are lost in the deep earth tones.

Alexis is two steps ahead of me shuffling her feet through the leaves, her wool coat reaching ever closer to her ears. Walking. You don’t have to look into each other and risk catching the misting, prickling, the red around the edges of things.

Sometime in the night, the trees must have applauded a cathartic ending. They threw their leaves at the feet of the actors. We’re walking through glory spent, and I can hear them whispering still. The floor is gold, but, somehow, everything above ground level is red, hanging in wait.

We are wondering how we’ll hold this picture together as we let the children play and splash in the colors. We stop on a bench and watch the pond. If it weren’t for a duck or two in motion, it would be possible to imagine that the leaves sinking under the surface were frozen already in the blackened water. Still life.

“Excuse me,” a man’s voice, an apology, deep and muted as if against the mud and the leaves.

He draws nearer like someone approaching a fox that might flee. He is low, bent, unaggressive, palm down as if to calm to tame, to ward off flight.

“I was wondering if I might I take photos of your children playing in the forest?” He doesn’t wait to let the strangeness of his request settle but hurries forward. “I’m an artist. All winter, I use the images to guide my paintings.”

His phone is at arm’s length, like everything else in this world. From a distance we can see the shifting silhouettes, splashes of color fleeing into the undergrowth, haloed in moments of dappled light, frozen like the leaves lost in the black and shadowy waters.

“I tell the story with the colors, one after another. I always start with red.” He is leaning into our social distanced zone, but I’m too curious to pull away.

I look up at the lowering sky, the grey that is sure to blanket the world soon enough, thinking of the artist’s impending fate. The end of his hopes for gathering inspiration. Or a blank canvas.

Alex is already sinking into her winter mantle. I expect her to say ‘no.’ Why should we take any risk at all? A man and his camera and our children, sacred in their play and secrecy.

But her forest-colored eyes reach to the sky as if the risk is something long lost friend that we have to meet again. Someone we stopped trusting but who, now, we miss and understand better. Shall we invite her to sit with us on the bench and watch the kids play, perhaps breathe in the fragrance of her cigarette?

“There is an exposition planned — of my work. If the museums stay open, you can come and see it all in two weeks.” His eyes scan the scene, capturing the colors and the light. The artist, ever hopeful that the museums will stay open to show his work.

And so we say yes in this world that is pigmented lately by no. We tell the children, “Not too fast, you’ll blur the photos.”

They are playing in slow motion, climbing trees. The artist encourages them to play with perspective and to stay out of light too brash. He asks them — where is the contrast? Where can one child look small compared to another, tiny compared to the forest?

And the mothers? Why not wander around the mud and the shadows and the carpet of leaves thrown to the earth by these celebrating trees? Background. Foreground.

At some point, he thanks us for our time and leaves us to our exploration of the tableau. To our rumination on the fact that our lives are work to be witnessed. We barely notice that we have faded into the fall colors.