The Remains
“March 1, 2010 - The State Fire Marshal's Office issued a statement on Tuesday that a New Hampshire woman was found dead in her home Sunday night. Neighbors across the lake from the one-story ranch spotted flames shooting from the roof and called for help. By late Monday the body remained unidentified pending autopsy. The driveway on the dirt-covered road leading to the house was sectioned off with yellow emergency tape and the scene was clear of investigators. A small bouquet of flowers lay in the snow beside the mailbox….”++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Six months after this terrible fire I took a walk with a friend visiting us on our lakeside vacation and on impulse we turned down this very driveway to come to the place where the doomed house so lately stood. An orange backhoe told the tale of what had been done this past week: the place was a moonscape, with not one stone left standing on another.“To think that this person had a whole rich life here and now there’s just nothing!” I said to my friend, looking mournfully down at the ash.But she was busy pushing some cinders with her shoe. Then she stooped and pulled out the burned edge of a page with the word “Smiley” on it. “Part of a John LeCarré novel!” she said, then walked more, stooped again, and stood holding a small clutch of dollar bills. I moved a few yards closer to the lake and began looking too. Before long I had found the coiled metal spring and the matted corner of a magazine. Then she found a shard of dinnerware. After a long silent time we gathered up all these items, which I carried back to this house to set out on this drought-parched patch of grass.This was two days ago and I find I can’t stop looking at them. If you click on the pictures you can enlarge them and read the words “free of guilt,” “free of responsibility,” “send no money,” “just mail this card, and ponder the way the lady who owned them is now past all this human clamor.She was my age exactly and the end of yesterday’s poem has kept running through my mind so much it is as if she is addressing me: “Think that life and glory flickered on the rushing bloodstream for me once, and for all who have gone before me, vessels of the billion-year-long river that flows now in your veins.”
