Long after the flames die, fires leave ugly memorials to themselves – brick, plastic, plywood and chain-link. But a wreath on a tree and a flag gently rippling from a Beacon Street building take you back a year, to when there was sunlight, but a fierce wind that whipped sparks from a welders torch into a fiery frenzy.
Michael Kennedy, 33, a Marine Corps combat veteran, and Lt. Edward Walsh, 43, a father of three, found themselves trapped in a basement inferno. One year later, Bostonians paused to remember them on this drab March day.
"They put their lives on the line every time they go to a little fire like that - it wasn't even a big fire when they got there," said Ed Gilmartin, who works in Boston and stopped on Beacon Street.
A young man in a hooded sweatshirt fumbled to arrange the bouquet he had brought into an opening in the chain-link barrier before the gutted building at 298 Beacon St. He was intent on paying his respects.
Blocks away on Boylston Street, there are flowers that people have deposited before the double brownstone arches of the Engine 33 and Ladder 15, where Walsh and Kennedy answered their final alarm.
"It really hits you hard," said Capt. Jim Welch. "It just brings up all kinds of feelings. We think more of the family than we ever do today.
