The Fire

May of 2022. 6:00 AM.

I had just hit snooze once more on my alarm, when a car horn started blaring outside my window. Glass breaks. The horn continues to blare.

A drunk neighbor was unusual on our road - the houses were so spaced out - but not impossible.

"There's a fire at 304 and nobody's waking up!"

The lightbulb in my brain flashes on. The cobwebs cleared and the gears roar to life.

My house is on fire.

My house is on fire and I'm in it.

My house is on fire and my family is still in it.

Jumping out of bed, I run past the bathroom yelling at my mom to get out. I ran downstairs to see where the fire was, how big it was, to figure out exactly what was happening.

The fire started when wires in our porch crossed and sparked, (I use this as my excuse to not exercise because the outlet was where we had plugged in our treadmill). Because the fire was trapped in our porch, no alarms had gone off; because of how old our house was and how it was built, it went up in flames within minutes.

I froze, seeing the smoke through one of the kitchen windows was like looking at death itself. To my left the living room window let in the sunlight that bounced off the hardwood floors. In front of me the window was as dark as the midnight sky, pitch black. As if the demons portrayed in television shows were staring back. To my right was the staircase to my sister's room - the one she was still in.

Running back upstairs I woke her up, grabbed my phone and finally left the house. Only to run around the fire itself and to the back of the house to grab our dogs out of the garage.

Before the fire department arrived a few passing strangers tried their best to help with the house's garden hose; asking if we had grabbed keys to any of the three cars sitting in the driveway.

Controlling my beast of a lab, Daisy, between my legs, watching my sister start to cry, and seeing my mom panic, I called my dad who had been at work to come home. The sound of the door of his office slamming behind him as he called to his fellow coworkers that he had to leave, will never leave my mind. The slow zombie like walk and the blood rushing out of his face when he arrived will never be forgotten.

Older siblings have a strange genetic code within us, the one that tells us to take charge when no one else is, or when we see they can't.

I called out of work. My mom called a family friend to pick up the dogs, my sister and I. I rattled off our names and phone numbers for the Police Officer as my mom had left her phone in the house. I immediately called friends and family, knowing the word would get out fast in our tight-knit community (half of the first responders were family friends). Seeing the distress in my family flipped a switch in me. I had to be the strong one because no one else could.

In the following months the summer became the best of my life, more on that in a later post. But I made friendships where I felt comfortable enough to finally verbalize my feelings about the fire, instead of blowing it off in sarcastic comments and dark humor. I've worked through the incident, recognized my feelings I had in the moment, and those I've had now that I've gotten a chance to grieve the loss.

The biggest lesson in all of this is that God's plan is greater than ours. I was thrown truly into the deep end of anxiety provoking situations, but I've handled it all with the support of family, friends and the peace that comes with knowing God's hand is in everything - even when you can't see it.

Whatever the traumatic event you will get through it, because if you have the mindset like me, it's just something you have to do. So you do it. But you're never alone.

- M