A Color of the Sky

From awakening at 6:30 am for two hours, we are watching an emergency unfolding, or else being mopped up, across the vale from our house on Birch Hill. Like a string of pearls, five fire trucks, three ambulances, and three fire chief SUV’s are flashing red, white and yellow, parked and idling along the road leading to the cul de sac. Curiosity got the better of me, so I toured the disaster scene (?) after picking up our newspaper in the cold darkness.

I counted the vehicles as I tentatively walked past them up the hill, not wanting to intrude or get taken out by a stray bullet if it were a hostage situation. For all the vehicles, not a single person to tell me what’s happening to the neighborhood. Finally, at the end of the road, a couple firemen hauling hose, and an aluminum ladder propped up to allow access to the snowy roof of the garage of a home which shows no sign of fire, smoke, or hostage standoff.

I suppose we think the worst because this was the week a recently disappeared young pregnant mother-to-be soldier’s charred remains were dug up in North Carolina, a father dropped his four young children into an estuary in Alabama, news broke of a deranged woman who starved her four toddlers to death, and the young female hiker missing for two weeks on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia turned up murdered.

Our Daily News Minor had these four stories clustered on one page in yesterday’s edition, each a quarter of the page, prompting me to warn Marin away from the paper, and later, prompting Marin, drawn like a mosquito to a warm body, to vow to cancel our subscription after reading that page.

I agree. There are maybe four pages of news which DNM lifts from the news services, and one of those pages is totally dedicated to giving parents nightmares.

As the light was coming up, Teo watched his weekly installment of Thomas the Train on PBS, Marin showered, I was writing. I shut down, and sat with Teo the last segment of his show, arm over his shoulders. Then, a quick shower and we took off to church.

It was “Poetry Sunday,” people bringing in poems found and written, and there was no stemming the flow. Everyone wanted to get in on the act. It is fun in a small congregation to receive the gifts people have to share. I really liked a “spring” poem by Tony Hoaglund, titled "A Color of the Sky" which ended,

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

Not quite spring here, but still, Nature is quietly at work. When we drove home in the minus 30 degrees, in the startling midday golden sunlight, Teo requested sunglasses.

Arriving on Birch Hill, Marin directed us to drive past the house which was under siege this morning. The wall was burned open revealing blackened timbers, we saw through to charred walls, and a big hole gaped in the roof, things I couldn’t have seen pre-dawn. Tragedy? Maybe.

We’ll know by tomorrow. We didn’t, in fact, cancel our Daily News Miner subscription, and this is precisely what they’re good at.