A reason to celebrate

The house is quiet as the snow falls outside my window. The world is awash with white, hushed and still. Branches bend under the weight of the wet snow; there are no cars passing by on the street. Ryan took the kids sledding and Hazel is curled up and sleeping on the couch after a romp through the fresh snow.

My Mom and Dad left yesterday for their annual month-long stay in California, just escaping the snow storm. It was this same weekend last year, the day after my parents left, that my brother’s house caught fire.

It was just after midnight on Saturday night and my brother, sister-in-law and their three kids were all sleeping in their second floor bedrooms. The fire started in the basement. My sister-in-law woke to the scream of the smoke alarm in their bedroom. They opened the bedroom door to find smoke waist high in the upstairs hallway. After going half-way down the stairs and glimpsing flames through the floor grate in the kitchen, my brother ran back upstairs to get everyone out of the house. He bumped up against the wall at the top of the stairs and it was hot to the touch. The fire had been burning a long time. Not long after they rushed out the front door wearing only what they wore to bed, the main floor collapsed into the basement.

They lost everything - their family home, all their furniture, pictures, clothes; a cat and a pair of hamsters were never found.

I didn't see the house myself, never made it out there after the fire. But I saw pictures and the image of the house ablaze is seared in my memory. The beautiful home that they designed and built themselves 13 years ago lit up the night sky like a giant torch. It continued to burn all night and through the next day, from the basement up to the second floor, from the center out to the ends. The smell of smoke was overpowering when I finally saw my brother the next day and could give him a hug. He smelled like a chimney, like he’d bathed in smoke. He was dazed and exhausted, up all night living a nightmare. Firefighters fought the fire for over 12 hours, dumping hundreds of gallons of water on the house to no avail. Once the smoke cleared, only a shell of the house remained. 

Somehow the firefighters retrieved my sister-in-law’s wedding ring from their upstairs bathroom. They were able to push my brother’s truck out of the garage and it only had minor smoke damage. Dodge, their golden retriever-lab mix, was spooked by the fire, but safe. The kids spent several hours in the back of a police car watching their house burn until they could get to my parent’s house 20 minutes away. They never did find out what caused the fire, and now that every trace of the old house is gone, we’ll never know.

The next day my sister and I took our niece and nephews to buy the most basic things - shirts, socks, underwear. My 10-year-old nephew needed shoes - he went out the door barefoot in the middle of a freezing cold January night. My oldest nephew needed basketball shoes to go to his high school practice the next day, my niece needed clothes to wear to cheer practice. Winter coats, shampoo, tooth brushes. They lost their phones and couldn’t call their friends - and yet I never heard them complain, never heard them say why me? They were so incredibly brave beyond their years.

I wasn’t there when the fire happened and it wasn’t my home, but I've felt the loss in a big way. I came too close to losing five people I love very much. And I mourned the loss of their home - a place that came to mean something to me for all the time we spent there celebrating family birthdays and holidays. I remember how exciting it was when they were first building the house, the times I babysat for them there before I was married, and how my children loved the adventures that came with visiting their cousins.

Theirs was a home in the best possible sense, full of the marks and memories of family. My sister-in-law adorned the house with big and small pieces she found in the West Bottoms and brought back to life, art she and the kids made, treasures from her family’s farm. There was a piece of an old windmill from the farm on one wall, and black and white photographs she took of the kids jumping across hay bales on another. A huge school room black board leaned against the living room wall where it cheerfully announced the latest family celebration. A crowd was always welcome. Gatherings were unfussy, noisy, never ordinary. As someone who grew up in the same house my father and his father grew up in, where three generations of children's heights are marked on a bedroom closet wall - I can't imagine losing all the reminders of my childhood.

But we have many reasons to celebrate the anniversary of the fire, to recognize all that was not lost. Terrible things happen in life and we endure. Facing adversity makes us stronger. If we're lucky, a traumatic event teaches us something. In this case the lesson is simple - people matter, stuff is replaceable. My brother and his family made it through and have a story to tell. I wish the fire had never happened, but I’m so incredibly grateful for the ending we got.

Family, friends and an amazing local community have supported my brother's family over the past year. Starting over from scratch is incredibly stressful, tedious, and exhausting. My brother and his wife chose to see it as a chance to hit refresh - to improve the home layout to work better for their now teenage kids, to slowly curate a new wardrobe just so, and add a bigger deck in back for drawn-out Sunday barbecues. The rest of us followed their lead and never looked back. 

Construction will be done in a few short months. Their new home, built on the same firm ground as the old one, will always be a reminder of what matters. And soon it will be filled with noise and laughter and people - and we will celebrate, just because.