Wherein I Write Things Down Where Everyone Can See

Hello invisible people of the interwebs!

I was trying to write these essays by myself. But when I write for myself I'm super boring, like someone trying to sound casually brilliant. ZZZzzz. As of this moment, I haven't shared the existence of this blog with anyone, but I think I need the notion of an audience to actually find my voice. So, to introduce--

After the July 2010 fire (that burned up my house and ruined all my stuff), everything in the house was gross. Wet, sooty, charred, burnt, molding, and really smelly - fire smelly, which if you've spent any significant time in your burnt up house, you would be smelling right now just because I said it. I really can't describe it. It just smells like burnt house. In the weeks after the fire, the inventory guys came in and inventoried everything for the insurance claim. They did it quickly because the company that was trying to mitigate the damage to our house had to get everything out of it so that it would dry out and the mold would stop growing. So we had a short window of time in which to go through every single item that was still go-through-able and figure out what we wanted to try to save. And by "save," I don't actually mean that we would be able to pull out furniture or clothing that we could use, I mean salvage enough to store in a plastic bin somewhere so that we could keep it and peek at it every once in awhile, but not have to smell it. And really, most everything was not even in that category.

I went in with a few particular objects to look for - favorite stuffed animals, a shirt my daughter (for some reason) had folded up and put it in a little plastic box in her desk drawer that she thought might have survived (it did - and thanks to the box, only took dry cleaning to get rid of the smell), a Ginny doll and doll clothes that had been given to my mother on her 6th birthday (1951), then to me on mine (1973), and to my oldest daughter on hers (2004), my second daughter's journals, my third daughter's lucky silver dollar, the Playmobil set my son got for his 5th birthday eleven days before the fire. I mostly found those things. The stuffed animals were sent out for cleaning and were never seen again. The Playmobil set was too gross, the silver dollar was nowhere to be found. Went through thousands of ruined books, which was incredibly sad, and tried not to think of them as okay (as in "really, I think they'll be okay") and tried only to "save" what I felt couldn't be replaced.

Then I got to the third floor. Before the fire, my husband was ready to photograph so that he could submit the pictures to Hoarders. The whole floor was pretty burnt. Lots of holes in the floor, the walls, the roof. The smell was almost unbearable. And it was August, so it was hot. It was also very wet from the firefighters' hoses and the rain coming in through the roof. I was mostly hoping to find certain important papers - birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports, transcripts, documentation of my husband's name change, basically things it would be a pain in the ass to replace. My purse was lost in the fire, which had in it a variety of things that I thought would be hard to replace with absolutely no paperwork to my name. I was also hoping to find some of the kids' artwork, which had been unceremoniously tossed up there for years. I got through those things. Grabbed what I felt I would regret not trying to de-smell, but the truth was, it wasn't much. It was easier than you would think to let go of everything you own. When push came to shove, so little of it was genuinely meaningful. It was sad, but not sad in the desperate way that makes you want to try to make things salvageable that really aren't. Just sad and hard, but one of those things you just have to do anyway.

And then I got to the last room in the attic. This is the room where all the "to save forever" boxes were - not only things for my kids, but from my whole life. The boxes of stuff I took when my parents sold my childhood home, everything I had collected and dutifully carted from apartment to apartment to apartment to apartment until they found a permanent (I thought) home in the third floor of my house. I should note that I am a saver. So there was a lot that was stored up there. And the worst of the whole weeks-long process of going through all of that stuff was that room. Because as I was digging around looking for kids' artwork, and finding boxes and bins filled with paper and water, I started to find some boxes that, while damp, were not soaked, and while dirty and a little charred and sooty and smelly, were not burnt to nothing. I opened one and saw a red plastic folder. I hadn't seen the folder in years but my deep memory instantly knew that it held letters and notes I had written and received in high school. And pulling out that box revealed a whole little enclave of boxes in the same condition, containing the same sorts of things, that were pieces of my life from my childhood, even my husband's things that I felt like I wanted to save for him (though at the time I put them up there, he said he didn't care).

And all of a sudden, I had this primitive gatherer (of hunter/gatherer fame) urge to just keep and save all of this stuff, as much as I could that wasn't destroyed beyond recognition. Paper. Letters, notes, papers I wrote, programs of shows, some photos (most of the photos had been pulled out and saved by other people, but that's a story for another post), cards, journals, planners. And I knew that these were the things that I had to save, because they told my story. And a lot of the story would have been lost if I had let those things go, and probably a lot was lost in the fire, but these pieces of paper, like so much flesh, were the record of my life and who I have been. So I pulled them out, sent them to be "ozoned" (stuck in a big pod with a lot of oxygen pumped in - don't ask me, I have no idea why that is supposed to help) to try (unsuccessfully) to make them less smelly and (successfully) to dry them.

Months later, back come the boxes from the ozone pods. Filled with these pieces of my life, like artifacts of some dead pre-house fire civilization. In all the years before the fire that I had them I just left them sitting in the boxes (I really did intend to get around to sorting them and pasting them into books) and didn't look at them or read them or even think about them much. And now they are as valuable to me as anything that could have been saved from the house. The magnitude of the loss of my own history threw me. Granted, its a little self-absorbed, but I don't want to lose my history to the foibles of memory or fire or neglect. So I decided to write about the pieces, one by one, that tell my story. Essays about each one. What it was. Context. Reflection. Maybe what it means in light of its near loss, maybe that it means little or nothing. There are things in there I don't remember, letters from people I can't place. But they are all pieces of a whole. So, while they will be randomly assembled here, I will be keeping them in chronological order in hard copy, because I'm curious to see the story they tell all together. So, self-absorbed though it might be, you are invited to share in this story as it unfolds.

Yours in pieces,
Jen