Ruins

Investigators were continuing their probe after drugs and weapons were found in the ruins of a fire Friday that damaged a condominium complex in Morrell Park. The fire marshal's office has ruled that arson caused the two-alarm blaze, which forced the evacuation of three dozen residents from the three-story Clarendon Court Condominiums, 3751 Morrell Ave. The ruling was disclosed yesterday. Investigators sifting through the rubbish after the 2:01 a.m. fire pulled out 5 pounds of methamphetamine and a cache of weapons in the unit where the fire started.

As you are probably aware, I've been on vacation for the past week or so. Oh . . . you're not aware? Well, that's understandable; you've probably been busy. I see . . . you haven't been busy, either. OK, if you want to take that attitude, it's fine with me; just don't expect me to notice when you go on vacation. Anyway, I was in Sicily, that island being kicked out into the middle of the Mediterranean Sea by the boot that is Italy. (I know, that sounds like passage from "Dick and Jane Get a Sun Tan"; I'm reaching out to a wider, dumber audience.

The only thing left was a set of fireplace tools. So Patricia Powers grabbed the poker and stirred through the ashes of her three-bedroom home. "This wasn't just a house, it was a whole life," she said, her eyes filling with tears. "I don't know what I'm looking for - just anything personal that I could walk away with. " But for Powers and scores of others who returned yesterday to this exclusive beach town south of Los Angeles, all that remained of the good life were smoldering ruins and a haunting memory of the wildfire that raced through 10 miles of canyon, destroying 300 homes in just 12 hours.

The 15-by-26-foot room in an unexplored corner of Eastern State Penitentiary didn't look like much. Two trees had breached one wall. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling in chunks. Debris - paint chips, wood, dust - lay in piles as much as a foot deep. But Cindy Wanerman looked inside two years ago and immediately saw something more: a holy space, a "room of God's spirit," a place where troubled lives might have been righted. It was a synagogue. There on the door were the ghost marks where two Stars of David once hung.

Long before first light of Easter morning, the Rev. John O'Donoghue makes his way quietly through the darkness of his mother's farmhouse a dozen miles from this village on the border between County Clare and County Galway. Fumbling for his keys in the dark mist, the Catholic priest opens the door of his little car and rolls it down the long driveway to the road to avoid waking his mother and his sister, Mary, visiting from Kildare for the holiday. Except for the twinkling of street lamps in Salthill 40 miles across Galway Bay, only the headlights of his car break the deepest blackness of the Irish night.

Every day for two weeks, my daughter and I left our small auberge outside the nearby city of Arles and trundled off in a rented car to explore the small-scale, but intensely personal, countryside of Provence. Somewhere in the middle of this odyssey, we started out quite early one morning for Les Baux, moving through a landscape of olive trees, red-tiled houses and fields of ruminative sheep to the base of the jagged white Alpilles. There, rising sharply above the Val d'Enfer (the Valley of Hell)

Brian Foster is a connoisseur of decay, so he can tell good decay from bad decay. Outside his North Third Street shop, there is no shortage of the bad kind - derelict buildings, weedy lots, broken glass. But inside is all splendid decay. A piece of intricate wrought-iron fencing perches against one wall, wearing a coarse fur of rust. Over the mantel hangs an ornate mirror with its gilt frame gently exfoliating gold paint. There are classical columns long ago loosed from their moorings, displaced gothic finials, hand-carved keystones, iron bolts in the shape of stars, all fragments of long-lost buildings.

For two centuries, give or take a few years, an enormous stone barn has occupied a patch of land now at the end of a winding Main Line driveway on Waterloo Road in Easttown Township. In the township's historic archives, it is known as the Kennedy Barn. For residents in the area, it's Mrs. Rossi's barn; for years, it was part of the estate of Rose Rossi, one of the cofounders of ANRO Inc., a printing company. But lately, it has been the central figure in the Battle of the Barn, pitting longtime Main Line residents against a builder of some of the region's largest and most luxurious residences.

Investigators were probing the ruins of Meadow Lodge, the former Strawbridge mansion at 940 Mill Rd., in Bryn Mawr yesterday looking for the cause of Tuesday's fire. This is what's left of the indoor pool area.