That day — a month after Christmas and four birthdays — began like many others for me. My brother, sister and I rode the bus to the small school in the nearby village of Woodhull, N.Y. With class barely under way, a fire siren split through the quiet of the winter day. Like every other curious first-grader, I looked up as I heard the trucks headed away from the town.
On the way home, I listened wide-eyed to the high school girls puzzling over the morning’s fire alarm. They did not know what happened or where the trucks went, but they found plenty to say about it before the bus driver dropped us off … not at our home on the hill, but at our grandparent’s house in the valley.
Puzzled, we walked up their drive. A clutter of people and household goods filled the back porch and kitchen at my grandmother’s. We looked at the assembled adults with many questions on our faces.
“Our house burnt down this morning,” someone said.
I looked around at the donated clothes and used toys brought by caring neighbors. I thought about all my new Christmas toys. All gone. My new birthday gifts. All gone. My bed, my dolls and the navy blue dress I persuaded my mother I needed for my Halloween play. All gone. Then I remembered my piggy bank with all my money. I began to cry because my money was all gone.
Once my dad understood my problem, he pulled out some money, gave it to me and I stopped crying.
Our home, a two-story house in upstate New York, had a small stove in the living room with a pipe that went up through a grate in the ceiling into the chimney. Heat from the stove and chimney warmed the living room and the bedroom above.
My younger sister, Sharon Lee, then 4, recalls that morning at home.
“I was sitting down on the end of the couch with Mom. She was going to read me a story when we looked up and saw a fire where the chimney went into the ceiling” — a fire between the floors.
“Mom put her coat on me, took me outside and put me in the car. Then she went back inside and went upstairs to get Burnie” — our 2-year-old brother.
It was only a short flight of stairs, but with the fire blazing it seemed insurmountable. My Aunt Erma recalled Mom’s stricken voice as she told her, “I had to go up the stairs to get my baby.”
Smoke had filled the room where Burnie slept with his head burrowed under his blankets — his favorite way to sleep. The firemen said his way of sleeping saved his life.
The newspaper clipping from that day says the chimney overheated. My family speculates, possibly a creosote build-up.
“Mom got Burnie and wrapped him up in another of her coats,” my sister said, “and took us down to Aunt Erma’s to call the fire department.”
Mom was so upset that she dialed the number wrong. Using a party line, she could not just call again. She had to wait a bit. Sharon said, “It took a long time to notify the fire department.” By the time the volunteer firemen gathered together, geared up and arrived, they only had time to save the new living room furniture.
Possibly Mom could have saved more, but as she always said, “You just don’t think of everything when you are in a panic.”
Ultimately, she only regretted not grabbing one thing: the suitcase of pictures and the baby books sitting in the living room beside the rescued furniture.
Professional photographers and friends replaced some of the pictures, but no one could ever replicate all that we had lost.
“Dad lost a whole lot of ministry books he had just purchased from a retiring minister. They were all gone,” Sharon Lee said and added, “That was a nice doll I had, too. I was very sad.”
We went to live in the tiny, one-bedroom house beside my grandparents while my parents found another place to live, began taking more pictures and assembling more toys, furniture, knick knacks and clothes — all quite unimportant. With their baby safe and older children in tow, they had all that really mattered.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)