After the fire, beauty among the ashes
Before the fire, the house looked much like the others around it -- neat, shaded by overgrown ailanthus trees. A plaster mermaid anchored the front yard, which was expertly planted with shaped shrubs and tidy flower beds. But what made the house different was its backyard: in it, a cement terrace with a reflecting pool, and whitewashed walls painted with green willow trees. Presiding over the scene, a stone Buddha.
The house at 15 Oliver St. in Somerville, occupied by two children and three adults, burned for six hours a year ago in January. Three hours into the burning, insurance appraisers appeared. "Somebody," they assured each other, along with us neighbors, "has to help him figure out what he lost." At midnight, Red Cross workers gently took the family into their van to eat a hot meal and sign papers. Over the next few weeks, the family's car would pull slowly up the street and stop in front of the house for a few moments, then leave.
For six days, the drooping corpse of the charred house sat alone, bound by police caution tape. Then crews came, dismantling what was left. Workmen hacked at the house , chopping it into smaller and smaller pieces. They tore out chunks of blackened insulation, like grilled salmon, and tossed it by the barrelful into a dumpster.
It took a while to figure out what we'd lost.
The transformation came quietly. At first, it was an absence, a burned-out building stunned by the violence of fire. Come spring, it was a presence , a verdant vacant lot. The family's flowers came bursting out of the ground; their crocuses purpling, azaleas lush. The lot looked almost tropical, a break in the relentless march of houses in East Somerville. In June, a newly painted "For Sale" sign was tacked to the chain-link fence.
By summer's end, though, the yard had grown wild. Rotted peony flowers hung like dead frogs, and crabgrass pushed up around untended beds. Itinerant trash -- soda bottles and cigarette packs -- had wedged themselves into the fence.
At Halloween, the lot sat eerie and silent. By Christmas, it was mass of decaying leaves and mud. The iron stanchions rising above the rubble of a cellar hole were all that was left of a porch once memorable for the chatter of a caged bird.
On the one year anniversary of the fire, a realtor told me they'd lowered the price of the property. No one, so far, is interested enough to buy it. Our street memory is short -- already new people have moved here who don't know what happened. Maybe they wonder who painted the willow on the whitewashed wall. Who left the amazing peonies, or the evergreens, now grown wild.
Last month it snowed. A paper-thin white crust of ice covered the terraced cement, and the lot suddenly gleamed like the marble ruins of some ancient Greek temple, frozen in the past. Monumental -- as if something very important had once been there.
Lesley Bannatyne is a freelance writer living in East Somerville. 
