Smoke Damage

Sometimes, I name my summers. The summer of 2008 was The Summer of My Western Bluebird. I surprised myself at the joy I felt with every sapphire swoop into the birdhouse and out again. The protective papa stood guard on the roof. The chicks’ mouths strained up to the hole, cheeping out as if they’d starve any minute. So, I just had to name the summer for them. Yet one morning, inexplicably, they left. We were hurt, really. How could they? And without warning. There was no “here is our first flight for you to see.” They were just gone. 

Time is like that. One day our own nest seemed as it should be. The next day “what should be” flew away in the dry winds, in the hard hot winds that blew a campfire on a hill above us into a bonfire, into a fireball so massive, a blaze so marauding, so swiftly coming that we knew we had to pack up whatever we could. Now. In our panicked calm, the first tier was easy enough. Computers, pictures—you know the list. But then we had ten more minutes. What to take? Grandma’s homemade dolls for the girls? Quickly! Our lone original oil painting? Hurry! The cat’s litter box? Of course we forgot that. When we stopped at Von’s to pick one up, two of my students tracked me down outside the store to ask if the exam would go on as normal in the morning. I had my doubts about normal. 

On our way to a friend’s house that night—both cars stuffed with our stuff—my wife called from her car and asked if we could pull over. When I got out I stepped immediately into the biggest pile of dog crap ever mounded on a sidewalk. There I was in the dark, imagining our house collapsing timber by timber, searching for a stick so I could scrape out my running shoes’ eight thousand crevices. I almost laughed. 

Reports came in. This place was burning. That place was not. Though rumors flew like embers, mainly we didn’t know much. The flames roared in our minds. We worried and prayed. Since our house had so many trees, we were sure we’d lose it. Our muscles tensed whenever we thought of what we should have taken: videos of the family, Europe mementos, this journal, that letter. 

After our ragged night, we learned in the morning that, incomprehensibly, our house survived, though our three closest friends lost theirs. One of them called to confirm. “We’re standing right in front of your house. It’s no rumor. It’s here.” We cried, knowing full well that just up the hill, their house lay smoldering, including the car they’d left in the garage, and their photo albums, and all the things still occupying ours. We imagined unspoken envy in their voices. We had not lost our house.

In the coming months we’d hear this phrase hundreds of times. “Did you lose your house?” When we said no, some folks moved right on, as if that loss were the only one worth noting. But what did it mean to lose a house? Where had it been left? Under the sofa? Down a hole? Maybe so. But why this euphemism and not another?

The second day after the fire, we snuck past the police barricades. We crossed the line. We skulked our way up the hill, feeling guilty for wanting to get back to the house. To take stock of the mess. To see what was ruined. To mourn the losses of our friends’ homes. 

In the neighborhood, a few others walked anxiously here and there, poking embers and flipping through pages of ash. The few firefighters guarding the remains had no intention of rounding us up. We were relieved. 

During the first few weeks, the neighborhood’s email list-serve was busy. We shared stories. One neighbor asked what we missed most. Here’s what I wrote:

The Crickets Have Gone

The crickets have gone
silent and I am soundly troubled
by their absence. I love their chirring
goodness, which, with the frogs’ blatting in and out
the deepness of the creek, sings to me
the melodies of home. But 

that night, that searing late twilight, 
when the wind-whipped flames
fell over the side of that tinderbox
hill, they gathered speed and heat and fuel and
descended. Oh it descended from on high, 
a firestorm, a sweeping fury. Then 

every twig and leaf and wooden deck
gasped and walls burned and cannon-fire
shot up and torched what withered and
smoked till the embers told the final tale
of one in three houses going down and down and
down, deadened with the singed
earth, with the blackened bark and bones of roses, 
charred doorposts and the dryers and washers that
stand bent—like us, for now

hollowed of life, just rusted cans and brooding. 
I miss the moist sweet air and so many things:
especially the laughter, the lights flickering
on and off, the street meetings at dusk when our dogs
wagged happily and everyone smiled
at the quail scooting under a rosemary thicket, 
and the coffee grinders in the morning, chirping out
the hope of the day. 

We hadn’t lost our home, but we couldn’t find it either. The walls were there but the smell of smoke persisted, in the house, in my psyche. How should we sort out what remained? Many things seemed lost. At times, I felt I had misplaced myself. 

To try to make sense of what happened, we attended a seminar on Post Traumatic Stress. It seemed a bit overstated even to admit we were going. But I knew it was more than survivor’s guilt that ate at me, though we had plenty of that. We knew we weren’t more deserving, that God was not capricious. But I was circling inward, unsure. 

While walking to the seminar, I wondered aloud if my years as a child of alcoholics had any bearing on my stumbling through the months after the fire. I don’t remember why I made that observation—but the counselor told us right away that those with early trauma more quickly affirm what a tragic event often leads us to conclude: “I am not safe.” Exactly. That was the center. The counselor had named me. And she had shamed me too—not intentionally, but I felt sheepish that though we still had our things, I had lost my sense of stability, or the illusion of it. I was fried, burned down, charred; I was trying not to evaporate. 

At the same time, being named “found” me. It explained my tardy recovery. It gave me a place to begin. One didn’t need to have one’s house burn down to feel that the walls weren’t protecting like they used to. I stopped blaming myself so much. And this naming also pointed me to what I knew all along, that we live by grace, not by the foundations we construct. 

Before and after the seminar, the rebuilding went on, the hammering and the drilling, the incessant noise. I learned to feel safe again—at least safer. Our house took multiple efforts of smoke removal: washing, painting and “bombing”—its own fresh start as stubborn as mine. 

As the smoke damage faded, I could look out the window with clarity again. I could see that bluebirds come and they go. We aren’t in charge of their visits. But we’ve learned that once they find their way to our place, they’re more likely to return. And when they nest again, however we’ve been changed by the fire, we know enough to take it all in, to be stunned by their beauty, to accept the unexpected visit, to let them remind us of who and what makes us safe, to name our summers after them.