© Another Day in the Country
When the sirens sing in Ramona, we listen. Ever since we have lived here, we have paid close attention to their wail. Whatever we are doing, we stop.
It is partly because the siren’s call is so seldom here. We know the siren is a signal that someone needs help. We listen. It is a small town — five blocks in each direction.
“Which direction is it going?” we ask. All of these years we have been tracking because we had loved ones in town. “Is that going toward Hank and Gertie’s?” We had better check. “What about Tony?”
The other night when we heard the sirens we were sitting in the living room: My sister, my daughter, my grandson and me. We stopped playing and tuned our ears to the sound.
My sister sighed, “Everyone I love is sitting here in this room,” she said. “It’s the first time that I’ve heard the siren and not had Mom and Dad or our aunts and uncles here to worry about; they’re all gone.”
“I think it’s the fire department,” I said, still listening. “They’re heading out of town.”
We were quiet for a moment and then life resumed its normal pattern.
It was not until the next morning that we heard the reason for the siren’s cry — and we realized most poignantly, once again, that the siren always signals that someone we love is in peril. While these kids are not our immediate family, they are children in our community whom we love. There had been a terrible accident affecting the families in our neighborhood, fringe relatives, dear friends, and James was dead.
“James? Our James?” we asked in disbelief. “What happened?” “How could this be?”
The enormity of this tragic meeting of two vehicles on a dusty dirt road washed over us in waves of horror. Young lives marked indelibly, forever, with the fragility of life.
“You’ve had a lot of deaths in Ramona,” my California daughter said.
We have. And we notice. These people are not just names in a newspaper column. We know them. These kids are not just faces in a blur of teenagers; we’ve watched them grow through elementary school.
There’s another difference between here and far off California: Our population is sparse. We know every person in our town and most of those who live in the periphery of Ramona, and furthermore all of these people know each other for much longer than we have.
If they’ve stayed in the country, they went to elementary school with their neighbors and probably their parents and grandparents before them did the same. They are intermarried, interrelated, and intertwined in their life experiences, their collective memories, their triumphs, and tragedies.
At James’ memorial service, I watched this unending line of family walk in behind his casket. “Where have they all come from?” I wondered. The line went on and on.
Eight towns the size of Ramona filled the high school auditorium at Centre as we celebrated one young life and by our very presence held his family in our arms and grieved the loss of a young life.
I think somehow we were doing more than grieving as we held onto a crumpled program and absorbed the stifling heat in our bodies.
We were holding on to life, for ourselves and for our children. Grateful to still be breathing, sweating, singing, crying, sharing — even cheering — on another day in the country.