Only Papers (Published May 16, 2022)

  A fire is coming up the hill from the beach.  Someone must have had a fire below.  The wind is blowing.  I thought this could never happen to us. My first reaction is to start dosing the house with water, but I’ve read and personally seen how fast flames can travel.  It is so windy and dry and the entire hill below us seems to be aglow almost instantly.  It is hot and embers are flying.  Quick, Susan yells!  Let’s get out of here. 

I run into my far-right closet in the bedroom, the one with shelves and no clothes, and start grabbing.  I find a large empty box in the garage and fantastically begin throwing everything from the shelves, starting with the top one, into the box.  I can get most of the first two shelves in the box.  I throw the box into the trunk.  I return and grab whatever I can from the third shelf.   There are lots of more bulky items like books and some smaller boxes.  What I don’t think I want gets thrown to the floor.   Let’s go, let’s go Susan yells again.  I dash out, get in the car and drive away.  As we turn onto Highway 1, I see a neighbor’s house with smoke coming from the roof, and I know it does not look good.  Once South of Irish Beach where there are no trees and little brush, we feel safe.  We stop and look back at the glow of flames in the blackish-grey smoke. 

A fire truck is coming up the highway from the South.  I have a dilemma.  Do I go back and fight to flames or stay with Susan in the car?  We are both shaken.  Susan encourages me to go but be careful and she’ll head down the road into Manchester and wait.  I jump out of the car and flag down the fire engine.

The smoke is thick and there are embers everywhere.  The fire engine stops at hydrants on the east side of the highway.  My job is to connect hose.  For an hour I pull hose and move connections.  I really do not know what is going on across the road.  I do feel it is getting cooler so assume the fire has cooled.  At some point, I realize there’s more than smoke in the air, there’s fog!  Almost as quick as the fire moved, the fog moved in from the ocean, going from northwest to southeast.  With it came drizzle.  A few minutes later, the smell and sight of the smoke was gone.  Hot spots remained and I was still at the hose connections some two hours later.  I could not leave the spot and I really did not want to see what happened to the house out of fear.  Several hours later, the hoses were away, and we left and drove to the fire station.  Susan was waiting.  She seemed to know more details than I being she could hear all the reports coming in.  She had heard the damage was minimal with some homes damaged but none destroyed.  We were pretty sure that our house was one of the ones damaged given the flames were chasing us as we sped away earlier in the afternoon.  We drove back to the house in fear of what we would find.  When we drove down the street nothing seemed amiss.  When we got to the front of our house, we were overjoyed to see it standing.  We kissed and hugged.  The garage door didn’t open so we had to go to the front door.  It was dark now and our only light was our cell phones, but all looked OK.  The deck was still standing.  We went in and opened the windows.  From what we could see, there was no damage.  A few minutes later, the lights popped back on.  The house was standing, not a window broken.  The house survived!

The next morning, we awoke.  We took our emergency kits out of the back seat and put them back into our storage bin.  Susan asked what items I had scurried to put in the trunk.  “Only papers” I replied.  Yes indeed, those three shelves are stuffed with pictures, my junior and senior high school yearbooks, my Bar Mitzvah cards, things my mom and dad gave me, a few things I have written, and not much more.  I realized that those things represent my life, things I can’t replace.  I emptied the box stuffing the contents back up on the upper three shelves for another day.