Pyrocantha

Pyrocantha berries: They pack a punch.

I was walking down the street somewhere recently in New York City, and suddenly spied a branch adorned with some hard looking, dark green, geometrical leaves and a spray of small orange berries poking through a black wrought iron fence. It immediately took me back….

We had one of these bushes—Pyracantha (I looked it up)—on the side of our house when I was growing up. It grew just on the other side of a brick fence that defined our back yard. We used to team up, me, my brother, and the neighborhood kids, with some on one side of the fence and some inside, pelting each other with them.

For the record, they hurt. And I have no idea how we decided who won. I just remember the vicious glee with which we threw them.

I went home to Bethesda not too long ago, for the express purpose of going to my brother’s grave to hang out with him. I didn’t always like to do that, but it’s become a bit of a thing for me now.

Afterward, I drove by the old house. And found that the brick fence had been removed, leaving free egress to the backyard. The Pyracantha bush was gone, too. I felt a brief surge of outrage. But of course, new tenants can’t be expected to know the importance of old landmarks to previous ones.

But it made me think about how much history we carry within us, about places, and people, for which there are no longer landmarks. My brother’s room in the hospital was a construction zone last time I visited NIH. So much history, the most important moments of some people’s lives, poof.

It reminds me of historical battlegrounds, most of which have long since become grassy pleasant places, the only vestige of their awful past a few placards with the history embossed on them.

I want a word, or a phrase, for this phenomenon that I’m feeling….Carried history? Internalized history?

Each of us carries previous worlds, and people, inside of us. Sometimes those places and people are gone. What do you do with them?

For me, there’s an almost unbearable urge to tell the story. Maybe it’s my way of creating a new landscape. Or a stage set, peopled with my players, where they carry on indefinitely. I’ve always had a problem with endings in books and in plays. Maybe that’s because I don’t really think, in real life, that there are any.