A few weeks ago I was watching the local 11 p.m. news when I heard about a fire in Sutton, a town where I used to live. The 200-year old house of Anne and Leo Austen had burned down. She escaped, but her husband died in the flames. She reportedly walked a mile barefoot through the snow to get help.
I knew Leo and Anne. Not well, but in a more or less neighborly fashion. I had just purchased a house a mile down the road from them, and I met them at a yard sale that Anne period ically put on during the summer. We came around to knowing each other in the way that most small-town newcomers and natives do: by talking about houses.
After she told me all she could remember about the house I'd bought, she then asked me in to see her house. Her husband, Leo, was inside. Retired, short and portly, with a large smile and thick hands, he cheerfully hello'd me while Anne gave him a summary of our conversation. They then took me on a tour of one of the most delightful houses I've ever been in. Like most old houses, especially one as old as the Austen's, it was a series of wings and ells tacked on to a small central core, which is what gave the house its charm. They had furnished it with a melange of stuff, and if I had had the training of an ar chae ol o gist, I'm sure I could've traced the permuta tions of their lives through the strata of their knick-knacks and furnishings.
Now all of that is gone. Leo is gone. Tragedies usually occur on such a grand scale that while we can feel concern, we are usually touched only at the outer edges of our imagination. But I knew these people, and that made all the difference. I could feel in my own feet the cold that must have cut through Anne's, taste and smell the hot cinders of the burning house. For a brief moment that news report cut through the rigid defenses around my mortality and opened me out. Time seemed to stop; petty and routine things seemed to go back to their proper dimension. It was one of those moments when all the bullying and pushing that living entails was suddenly beside the point and all that existed was a needle of grief that threatened to pierce the heart like a loose-woven cloth.
Such sympathy did not, could not, last for long. The news report went on; I went on as well. Simply another death to carry, in a life where living on means losing. But such burdens are never easy, such griefs are never light; but then the weather must come on and the news must begin to accumulate again and the smell of dry ash and wet charcoal will disperse among the breezes of food and talk, though it's never quite out of the nose or absent from the mind. That may be the hardest burden of all to carry.
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