FIre And Rain

I've seen fire and I've seen rain
-James Taylor

Yesterday I wrote about the rain. There was also a fire. It was March of 1985 and I was pregnant with my first child. The phone rang just before 6am and it was my brother calling to tell me "the house burned down. Well, not burned all the way down but it's really bad and you need to come over."

I'm trying to come to, and trying to grasp what he just told me, and trying to figure out what to do. The only thing I could think of at the moment was to call my aunt. My parents and grandma were out of the country, visiting my sister. Before they had left, my aunt had called and joked that if I needed a surrogate mother, don't hesitate to call her. If there was ever a time to call, this was it.

My aunt agreed to meet us at my folk's house and my husband and I headed out. The only problem was, there was a good foot or more of snow that had fallen the night before and roads hadn't been plowed. What should have been a 20-30 minute drive ended up taking us almost 2 hours even though we were traveling on city streets in highways. When we turned the last corner onto my parent's street, I was not prepared for what I saw...

Their house, built in the 1940s had floor to ceiling windows in the living room and a tuck-under garage. The garage door had been chopped through with an axe and lay in a heap in the snow. And all the windows were smashed out with black soot coloring the white exterior of the house. Broken glass was everywhere. The fire department had immediately broken the windows to let the smoke out so they could more safely enter the premises. My aunt arrived with face masks and insisted I wear one. She was adamant. I was pregnant and who knew what kind of toxins were in that house now?

As we picked our way through the house, there was just as much glass inside as out. Walls were black and large pieces of plaster hung down from the ceiling. The tile in the bathroom had melted and curled and that room seemed particularly burned. The firefighters had chopped holes in the wall, I think to verify that nothing was burning inside the frame. Debris was everywhere. The basement was almost gutted with one wall entirely gone.

My brother said he'd been up late studying--until about 2am. When the smoke alarm woke him at about 5am, he thought it was his alarm going off and it took a bit for it to register for him it was the smoke alarm. He called 911 and they asked a lot of questions. He finally hung up on them, needing to get out of the house, grabbed the dog, and ran barefoot through the snow to the neighbors house where he called me.

I managed to reach my dad overseas, and told him there was a house fire. It wasn't bad enough that they needed to cut their trip short, but I wanted him to know about it. My dad took it in stride, and that was that. They next day he called back. "You wouldn't have called me in England if it wasn't bad. Tell me what really happened." I told him it was pretty bad.

We ended up calling an insurance adjuster, a company that came in and boarded up the house (we had already confronted one possible looter who tried to walk in the back door). They also walked through with a video camera and took pictures of everything--and they started inventorying everything, right down to the contents of the bedroom dresser drawers. We had to help them with that part...identifying the remains of a lot of things. They determined that some bad wiring in the attic had caused the fire, had fallen down along some pipes to the basement, and then come back up the clothes chute to the bathroom. So all three levels of the house had been affected.

When my folks arrived home, my aunt took my grandma back to her house and left me to take my folks home. I remember my brother coming down the front steps as we arrived at the house and my mom throwing her arms around him in a long hug. It was only then that it hit me we could have lost him. It was hard walking through the house with my folks and watching them take in the damage.

My folks were advised to level the house and rebuild. They moved in with my grandma, a block and a half away, for the months that it took to rebuild. And then the refurnishing. A lot of memories were lost with the house though. One day my dad was at my house, opened a kitchen drawer, and just stood staring at it. Finally he commented, "We don't even have a junk drawer anymore." So the family heirlooms and treasures I do have...the photographs, the soot covered baby books, the smoke colored documents, are all the more valuable for having survived the fire.

Twenty-five years later, I took an oil painting that my great-grandfather had painted, and that had hung in that house, to an art dealer for an appraisal. The art dealer's first comment was, "This painting has been restored, hasn't it?" I told him yes, it had been through a house fire and was cleaned and restored, and how did he know? He explained the technicalities of his art and how he knew. But the fact that that painting survived the fire and now hangs in my home is priceless to me.