Issue 15
Whim
Mary Rose-Webster
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Crimson Raindrops
Perhaps it was the weather making me capricious, the Tiepolo blue of the
summer sky going to my head, as I walked among the tents at the Friends of
the Library annual antique show. The booth where I lingered was a museum in
miniature. Expensive objects, tempting like chocolates, filled the shelves
of a glass case.
"May I see that wooden box, please?" I said.
I pulled back the chamfered lid to reveal three rows of tiny squares,
cracked and dusty, like rare gems in a specimen box. Each color had a
name -- lard, brick, lake.
"My artist son is in love with color," I said to the dealer. "But a hundred
and forty-five dollars for old watercolors? What good are they if he can
only look at them?"
The inscription scrawled on the bottom of the box read: "To George H. White,
from Julia, December 25, 1846." I wrote the check.
My son paints crimson raindrops, tangerine whales, sailboats floating in
moonlight. "They don't make colors like these anymore, Mom," he says, as he
sails his boats through an indigo sea. "Just look at the intensity of this
blue."
~Mary Rose-Webster
Mary Rose-Webster writes creative non-fiction. Her essay Reframing My
Life was recently published in a collection entitled Herspace: Women,
Writing, and Solitude. Email.
© 2004 by Mary Rose-Webster. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2004 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.