Seeing Through the Smoke
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
The fog that sometimes settles into the valley during winter inversions always reminds me of the day I was pulled over by a cop for running a stop sign on the way to work. Now that I look back on it, I am sure that morning must have been bright and sunny. I was headed for the first teacher workday of a new school year. Since I tended to be early for work, that meant it was about 6:45, maybe 7 AM–sometime in late August. But this memory is very clear—dark and misty. I saw the flashing lights and pulled over.
I rolled down my window, and a patrolwoman leaned in. “Ma’am, you missed stop sign back there. Can I see your license, please?”
I had been driving this exact route every day for at least 3 years. I was certain I had never missed that particular stop sign before. But then, how could it be dark on an August morning? I handed her the license. “I’m sorry, Officer,” I said. “My house burned down a few days ago. I must not be thinking very clearly.”
“Hmmph.” She said and headed back to her car’s computer.
A few minutes later she returned, a very different person. “Ma’am,” she said. “Your house did burn down. You’ve got enough trouble. I’m certainly not going to give you a ticket.” She reached through the window and patted me on the shoulder. “Good luck,” she said.
The fire chief told me later that the fire probably started from a cigarette or two dropped through the slats on our small deck outside the dining room. Son #2 and his buddy had been using my absence at a professional development seminar as an opportunity to enjoy a forbidden smoke on the back deck. We stacked cut logs under the deck to use in the wood stove during winter months; the temperature that day was near 100 degrees–all the ingredients for an impending calamity.
Our back-fence neighbor called Daughter #2 who was lounging on my bed, reading. “Rachel, the house is on fire. Get out now!” Daughter #2 dropped the phone and leaped down the front stairs just as all the upstairs windows blew out from the heat. I heard later from the fire investigator’s report that the flames were measured at almost 2500 degrees. A phone call saved my daughter’s life. (She’s now a mom with four kids of her own.)
The fire roared through the upstairs swallowing whole everything in sight: the kitchen, dining room, living room, and family room. Half the roof was destroyed. When I walked through with the insurance agent a couple of days later, we found all that was left of my kitchen–a black puddle of hardened plastic by the back door—my microwave.
There are other stories to be told about the fire, but oddly, it’s the people in my neighborhood who rise to the surface of my memory. Since the education professional development I attended wasn’t at my school and cell phones were an almost unknown technology, Daughter #2 couldn’t get hold of me or her dad, who was across the valley at work. When I arrived home several hours later, the fire engines were gone. Son #2 and his friend had left before the blaze actually took off, so they had no idea what happened. Daughter #2 and Son #6 were home alone and had been taken in by a friend. (Two children were far away on missions in Sweden and Hungary, respectively. Son #3 was at a student leadership camp. Sons #4 and 5 were away at Scout camp.) To this day, I distinctly remember thinking later, “Everyone is alive. The rest doesn’t really matter.”
Our insurance company offered to provide a hotel for a few days, but by nightfall our neighbors around the corner opened their home to us. Conveniently, they had an authentic, full-sized Native American-style tepee set up in their backyard in preparation for a Mountain Man gathering. For three weeks it housed two of their sons and several of mine. Those boys are still friends. The neighbor and his wife cleared out their family room, added a queen-sized bed for my husband and I. Daughter #2 slept on the couch.
I was pretty certain finding a rental while our home was being rebuilt wasn’t going to be easy because with five kids at home, we still had a large family. Plus, my children all walked to school. I was a high school teacher, I had to be at work at 7 AM–not an auspicious time to drop off a kindergartner at our local elementary if we had to move some distance to find a place to live.
Once again something clearly beyond fate intervened. Friends who had lived five houses down from ours moved to Idaho, and their house hadn’t sold–though it had been sitting empty for several weeks. Would I like to rent it? We were there from August to December, our insurance company making their house payments. It sold five days after we moved back into our renovated home.
Just before Christmas, my friends invited me to a “fire” shower. Seventy women from church, PTA, work, and neighbors as far as 10 or 15 blocks away showed up and restocked my kitchen. It took two loaded pickup truck beds to carry the presents they brought. I am still using some of the gifts from that day almost 30 years ago.
I learned long ago to quit praying for life to be easy. It’s just not designed that way. Trouble comes, no matter how carefully we plan, or how comfortable our current circumstances seem. I know now it wasn’t really dark that morning I encountered the policewoman at the stop sign. But it felt that way—three days after my house burned down. It took me some time to open my eyes and look around. When I did, I was overwhelmed to discover there was light everywhere.