Fire

The last time I can remember the sky looking like that was seven years ago. I stepped out of the church, walking under the smoke-darkened skies to the waiting black limousine. Everything around me was hazed with orange; the air stank of ash and fury.

For seven years I have dispassionately waited my way through fire season. I have watched billowing smoke clouds form on the horizon, numbly hoping a generous wind keeps the skies above me blue. For six years the season favored me, didn't force me to remember.

The morning we came home from the hospital I remember the uncharacteristic stillness of the June skies. No wind, no bird song, no passing cars. Just stillness and quiet.

I don't remember what day the fire started. But the smoke gradually crept over the mountain tops, and on the day we buried him, an expanse of smoke stretched from horizon to horizon, obscuring bright blue with a coat of ashy brown.

But more than the thick wisps of grey, I remember the sun. The distinctness of its edges. The orange cast it shed on everything around me. Its angry scarlet color.

This fire season has not been so generous. On Saturday, we wound our way up the freeway toward home, driving into the darkness of a sunny late-summer evening blanketed in smoke.

And there it was. The perfect sphere of fiery orange in the sky. So calmly and so distinctly coloring the world with wrath.

The stillness of the morning my father died stands starkly in my memory against the fury of the day we put him in the ground. As the earth pressed down on him, the skies pressed down on us. The world out of joint, the wrath of the fire in the hills mirroring the wrath of some unknown force against his untimely death. The arbitrary viciousness of those fires something I felt so keenly, reviled so completely. Understood so deeply.

I silently wept as we finished the drive home last weekend, the sun falling close enough to the western horizon to again become an indistinct yellow mass against the whitening blue. I wept for the sadness of these days, for the smell of the air and the oppression of the skies. I wept for the empty wrath I learned to understand seven years ago. I wept for the cruelty of this season--for angry skies and hopeless families and loss.