The Wrong Lilies

The Wrong Lilies

Friday, July 20, 2012

FIRE AND FLOOD AND MEMORY


Last year and this year have been shocking in the violence of weather.  Such terrible scenes of destruction appear on news reports:  whole neighborhoods reduced to ash, or flood waters sweeping away homes and historic bridges, or tornados scouring buildings away and leaving only bare, damaged earth.

Sometimes the news seems like a strange opera, the kind where one chorus is singing, “There’s no such thing as global warming, there have always been weather disasters and earthquakes and hurricanes”; and the contra chorus singing, “But look at all this terrible destruction.  What shall we do?”

The following is a quote about his losses from someone named Rick Spraycar, one of many victims of the 2012 fires in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and when I read it, it almost seemed like poetry, terribly sad poetry that perhaps sums up the sense of so much loss by so many:

The blanket that was on my bed when I grew up,
a bunch of things my mother had made.
It's hard to put it into words.
Everything I owned. 
Memories.

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