The summer of the fire a praying mantis sat on a pineapple in the kitchen for so long that the fruit rotted beneath it. She was such a presence we didn’t dare move her and she hardly moved herself, occasionally a shift to another frond, perhaps a turn around. I was told later, when I was recounting how our summer had played out oblivious to what was coming, that such a visit is a portent of protection in the face of danger. All hot July we paced about her, not eating pineapple, aware of her. And the earth cracked and the sun sizzled and rivers already dry dried further underground and a smoker made their way to a pit stop on the side of the motorway an hour by winding road away from us, ready to throw a cigarette out of a window, or not grind it out on the ground or not notice one tiny ember flying away into six hundred hectares of national forest which dipped and swayed in the push of hot wind. Was she still there when we packed our bags and left, thinking another glorious summer over, see you next year? I can’t remember. But I remember waking at four in the morning to my phone buzzing, a message from the friends to whom I’d lent the house after we were gone, saying there’s a fire, we’ve been evacuated, we’ve shut the shutters. I sat up in bed, turned the light on, found a live map of the area burning, tried to figure out where in that vast smear of red was home. The horror of realising it was in the centre. And here’s the extraordinary thing, because I’m sitting here now in that house, so yes, we know it survived but get this: the fire, the six hundred burning hectors of it, came right to the door. It burned the hammocks hanging between beams, it took out the tree beside my bedroom. It obliterated the lemon grove that edges the kitchen courtyard. Paintwork bubbled, a chair on the terrace melted. Everything in every direction was blackened to a swirling hot crisp, a garden wiped out, a forest gone. But it didn’t touch the house, not even an inch of it. The ancient cypresses which stand as sentries at its corner remained completely unscathed. The pompiers stood in the pool, their hoses aimed at the wooden roof yet that cannot account for the miracle of it. We were engulfed. And a friend who lives nearby messaged me as I watched on my phone from England, after it was over and I had been up all night. She said It was as if an angel put its wings around it, I felt it, I could feel its presence. A praying mantis came and told us to be ready. An angel came and put its wings around it. And when I told the taxi driver this story as we weaved through the scars of fire still apparent, winding up to the house this summer, she nodded and said yes as if this was normal.
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To you and @Joshua Doležal (wow, crazy synchronicity that you both wrote about fire on the same day). "Fire" has a strange and powerful draw for me as does Norman Mclean's book that I wrote about here, since we're sharing posts: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/young-men-and-fire-by-norman-mclean Perhaps I'll do a repost of this one some day in the future.
So evocative, and so strange that we both posted essays about fire on the same day. Mine is rather the opposite of yours in length and tone! For anyone interested: https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/mutiny-in-the-north-woods