Twenty Minute Scribble

Shep was howling on and on. We finally woke up to a strange orange-y glow coming through the windows. Actually, it felt orange-y glow in the room. Warm, like a fire. Finally, after three weeks of living in this cold, little house, I felt warm, but something was terribly wrong. As we left the room, flames broke through the glass on the kitchen entry door and curled round catching the curtain we’d just walked through from our bedroom.

Forty-three years ago today our house burned. We’d married four months earlier.

This little concrete block house was the old Perlitz house. There was no indoor bathroom. There was running water at the kitchen sink, but it was remarkably sketchy. Sometimes I could get water to do the dishes. It was a miserable little house. Beige. Very beige in all respects but one or maybe two. Old Fritz had trimmed out the house in a warm butternut wood that I still remember. It was warm and had honey lights somehow. The other thing that was in the house was a huge old cabinet that stood in the bedroom as a closet that we shoved across the opening to the living room.

I remember where each of our belongings stood. My piano was an impossible ruin, but we saved out a bookcase and the cedar chest which two had to be refinished. My mom did this job. Thanks Mom, I can’t believe how hard you worked to salvage things in the busiest time of your life.

The fireman’s spray was at least as ruinous as the fire itself. Elv had yelled me out of the house. He opened the front door, no steps and I jumped into the snow while he called the fire department. Then out. He ran around the house and untied Shep from the front step, and then we waited shivering in the cold starry night. I actually don’t remember much about it after that. I think we stood on the road. Mom and Dad came right after the fire truck came by their place a half mile away.

Looking back, I still hate it that I didn’t throw a few wedding gifts and the new kitchen appliances out the window. The snow would have caught them, safely. I guess that’s how it is, you want to do it over, but of course, I don’t, really.

It just feels like this happened to someone else, still. Mom felt it more than I did, then. Maybe even now. Sometimes I wonder what was wrong with me. I ended up hating Aunt Beulah’s house after that, as well. Because it was ugly and unhandy with no toilet indoors, either. And our honeymoon furniture was other people’s cast-offs. I didn’t know how to be sad or grateful in those days. I was what is termed as “shut down”. I have no explanation. Thus began a string of unfortunate events in our young lives. Mostly, I have no feelings about them. It happened to someone who was supposedly me…I don’t really know her. I’m confident that the counselor gurus could help me grieve even now, so that I can heal healthily. I’m just old school enough to think, “What’s done, is done.” Nobody died, we both grew up, and the Lord has blessed us abundantly with forty years of good memories and a family who loves Jesus, to balance out the hard parts of our lives.

I reckon that was a little longer than 20 minutes.