Autumn’s Silent Auction

It is written in the folios
of foliage starting to catch fire, burn, turn to yellow, red,
or orange flames

that everyone will fall, flutter to the ground, and be ground down
to nothing more
than least leaf meal in a winter overcoat’s dark pocket.

At 92 years old
my mother, amateur watercolor artist, feels the forest fire
that rages through

the hills around Great Barrington kindle her cold bones’ marrow.
She’s had a new
furnace installed, whose forced hot air will blow her warm this winter

and fan the fire
within her. She wants “to find homes” for her last 60 watercolors
before she dies.

“They’re like children,” she says. “I want to see them go
out into the world
and make their way. Or at least someone else should lug them

to the dump.
Not me!” Hung on her white walls or stashed in cupboards, closets,
black leather portfolios,

or under beds, she is surrounded by her paintings like a matriarch
in a family
reunion photo. Here are the places and seasons she’s lived through.

Within a shady park
along a Parisian boulevard, two lovers kiss on a blue bench, wrap arms
around each other as if they

aren’t watercolor, but Carrara marble. A woman in a yellow skirt
swishes, bewitches
watchers, sashays by, holding the hand of her thigh-high daughter

dressed in a red
smock. April, 1954, and the plane trees spread the green
jigsaw puzzle

of their new leafage over everyone. A red car passes, then
a green one. The afternoon
is stop-and-go. I turn around. On the wall behind me

I see purple New England
mountains in winter. For the foreground’s snow my mother used
the negative space of blank

rag paper itself. The gray calligraphy of a frozen creek
winds me
toward a weathered, rust-colored barn and silo, behind which

stand an outbuilding
and farmhouse with darkened windows. The bare trees’ branches
vein the sky,

blotting paper ink-splotched with blacks and grays, plus a few russet sunset
streaks to match the barn’s
warped boards. Dusk, below zero, and no one ventures out

into this
inhuman cold. Within the clouds’ dark Rorschach, a slow
giant caterpillar

with two horns crawls. Last night I programmed for my mother
a telephone
emergency help system. If she falls in her ground-level

condominium and can’t
get up, she has only to push for four seconds the red panic button
on the white plastic pendant

she wears about her neck and her telephone will dial 911.
“My watercolors will
be scattered farther than my ashes,” she tells me. “I have

pictures all over—
California, England, Hong Kong, China, Dubai. Why I
had someone come up

to me at an outdoor art show years ago and say that he saw
one of my paintings
in a New York City condo that a realtor walked

him through. He asked
if the watercolor came with the condo. The realtor said no.”
My mother estimates

that over the years she’s sold 600 pictures at the outdoor art shows
she used to go to
every summer. To get rid of her last paintings, she gives them

to silent auctions
at church bazaars. “Once a woman stood all day in front of
my watercolor

and wrote down a bigger bid whenever someone else’s
topped hers.
She wanted that picture so! I forget what it was of . . .”

My mother shows me
the painting she plans to donate to the Congregational
Church’s Christmas

Raffle & Rummage Sale. A gray gravel road leads to a tiny
white house
about to be swallowed by the maples’

40-foot high
flames. Tomorrow morning I’ll say goodbye to my mother
and drive my rental car,

a white Chevy Cobalt, back to the airport. Outside her window
brittle brown leaves
almost cover the lawn’s gray granite outcrop left millennia ago

by a glacier. “How much
will you bid,” wind murmurs through the eaves, “for each charred leaf?”
I would give my life.