Phoenix House

I was in front of the little ranch house we recently bought when a car slowed to a stop. The driver lowered the window and smiled at me. Assuming she was a new neighbor, I introduced myself.

“I’m Judy,” she replied. “I was just at the cemetery cleaning up my son’s stone- he died in a car crash, years ago- and I thought, why don’t I drive down Echo Street and see what’s what?”

Somewhere between my I’m so sorry and nice to meet you she said how much street had changed. It didn’t used to be a dead end; at the end was a dirt path that led to town. She asked when our house was built, and I told her 1986. Makes sense, she said. After the fire and all. There was pretty much nothing left of the old place.

Fire? Old place?

She told me that the guy who used to live in the house where our house stood now was a volunteer firefighter, and that was the irony of it. It was the summer of 1982, middle of the night, when he smelled smoke and pushed his wife to safety from a second-floor window. When he tried to rescue his father, two teenage sons, and their friend who had been sleeping over, he died along with them.

Nothing about this showed up in the land records or title searches; the realtors, if they knew, said nothing. If it wasn’t for my chance meeting with Judy, I would be blissfully unaware. Standing there after she left, I searched for a lingering sense of terror, but what came to me through birdsong and warm breeze was calm.

I decided that healing happened, unexamined and non-specific. For some reason Carl Sandburg’s poem Grass got looped in my head.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—  

            I am the grass; I cover all.  

 And pile them high at Gettysburg  

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.  

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:  

            What place is this?  

            Where are we now?  

            I am the grass.

            Let me work.

The house that rose from the ashes is practical, and most of the time I’m a cheerful person. The work of living life is regeneration, and it works best informed and purposeful. What I’m saying, Judy, is thanks for sharing. I banish cobwebs while Sam puts up the screen door. I can’t wait to bring the family here. We are the grass, and we are working.