The Fire

One windy day in mid-April, I was riding the bus home from school.  I was 16 and didn't want to be riding the bus but Marianne had track practice and was driving home later.  We saw smoke in the distance.  When the big bus lumbered onto the flat road below my grandparents' meadow, Willard, the driver stopped the bus.  We all just stared.

My grandparents' house, the beautiful brick house, was on fire.

I don't know when I've been more stunned.

Eventually, Willard started the bus up again and dropped me off at my stop further down the road.  When I got off the bus, I started to run up our lane towards home.  I was overtaken by my mom in our car.  She came to take Olivia (who was also on the bus) and me back over to Grandma and Grandpa's.  My brothers, who were homeschooled at the time, were already there.  So was my dad.

Seeing my dad seemed to make me feel worse than seeing the smoldering house.

My big, strong dad looked lost and hurt.   And incredibly sad.

You don't exactly call 911 and have firefighters show up within minutes where I grew up. It's too rural. My dad, along with other neighbors and some volunteer firefighters had been fighting the fire.  He had climbed on the roof to combat flames but it had collapsed underneath him.

Luckily he fell into the huge upstairs bedroom...the room where he grew up.  He made his way to the back window then in some sort of Tarzan style move, swung across a wire to the cookhouse, a little building off the back of the house.  He'd lost his glasses and his hat when he fell through the roof (I guess why he looked lost to me) and was pretty badly burned.

My grandparents' lawn was strewn with furniture and belongings that had been saved.

I wondered the same thing all the grandchildren seemed to ask about.

Was the crocodile skull saved?  The headdress?  The shark's tooth?  The snakeskin?

Yes to all.  (My brothers had been there after all.  They sought out what mattered to our generation.)

I was still trying to grasp what had happened when my grandparents drove up.  They'd been on their way to Fallon, NV where my uncle and his family lived.  My mom had called the Highway Patrol to stop them.  When they pulled my grandparents over, my grandma had been driving.

She said, "Was I speeding?"

"I wish that was what I had to tell you." The patrolman said, "Your house has burned."