Ash Wednesday Fire

A pleasant cool settles the ground flecked by sunlight drizzling down through a tall canopy of trees. A slight wind tickles the top leaves with whispers. All seems idyllic. Yet forty years ago on a Wednesday, fire blasted the bush here with a wall of furnace heat. A blackened wasteland was all that was left leaving seventy-five lives lost in its wake. The bush never counts the dead nor records their names. For it, there is only blind obedience to life. Eons have passed with countless fires scarred into the length of its long history. The land here is primal, beyond our time, evolved to bathe in cinders and seed the future in showers of flame. Buffeted by hot, dry winds and relentless heat, its beauty becomes an incendiary bomb waiting to be lit. But it harbors no intentional ill as it cycles through its ancient playbook of burn and renewal. Our ways don't fit well with such elementary forces. As tenants, death is sometimes the tragic price we pay as rent, the interest accrued on love. Nothing is meant to be, but twenty six years later, it claimed a further one hundred and seventy three. They all have names and leave families with scars notched into our history.