Fire Sale

When I was in 5th grade, we had a house fire.

The type of house fire that you see on the news. Billowing black smoke, screaming neighbors, sirens, and a family in shambles. That was our family. That was our house.

My mom and I were home when it started. A few weird noises from the other room. Our dog, Joy, was uneasy. Then the flames broke through the wall. We grabbed what we could, which wasn’t much. My mom grabbed her purse and her phone, calling 911 as we ran out.

I grabbed the dog but she ran back inside.

The firefighters arrived and did their best. They held me back. They were still fighting the fire from the outside because the inside structure was unsafe.

Joy’s safety spot was always under the kitchen table. I knew she’d be there.

I broke free from the firefighter holding me back. I had no shoes. It was like a movie inside. The fire had engulfed everything. I ducked a flaming beam, coughing from the smoke. My feet burned.

I found Joy under the table where I knew she’d be. She was frozen with fear. I ran out with her in my arms. We put her inside a neighbor’s house.

My dad had rushed home from work, the column of thick smoke guiding him to his own home like a pin on the map.

We all stood there at the end of the driveway.

I can still feel the fear and grief that overcame my parents as they watched.

My dad was living a true déjà vu from hell - this was his second home to be destroyed. When he was a kid, his house was completely erased by a hurricane. He spent the next few decades rebuilding in so many ways. This house was a symbol of the life he had built for himself and his family.

My mom sobbed and sobbed about the family scrapbooks and photo albums. There was no cloud storage back then. Those were all we had.

It took years to recover.

We lost everything in that fire. We also lost our sense of security, stability, and the material representations of our memories and values.

But we were not injured. Everyone was safe and healthy. The future was uncertain and we didn’t know how we’d do it, but we knew that we just had to move forward day by day.

And we did. The house was rebuilt. Then we sold it and moved on.

I don’t think about it much, but it shaped my views of the world in ways that I haven’t really appreciated until now.

Over the subsequent years, we began to re-accumulate our physical possessions.

It’s amazing how we can come to feel so attached to physical items that can go up in flames in an instant, then be replaced the very next day.

Over the years, everything was replaced. And then those things we replaced by new things. When I went away to college, I took some of these things with me, then Emily and I began to accumulate our own physical items. Drawers and drawers and closets and basements and cabinets and bins and boxes of stuff.

So as we’ve been decluttering, purging, and selling as many of our belongings as we can, it’s been a fire sale of sorts. I am feeling many of the same things that I felt nearly two decades ago. This time around, though, I am a little bit more comfortable with those feelings.

I know that things are just things and we can always replace them. Our family, friends, and health are all that really matter.

And we have cloud storage now.