Fire and Fault: Rethinking the Fear

My youngest sister (in-law, but also in-heart) created this card to go with the large shell. I added the others.

It changes you.

The whole house burned, with the kids and me escaping in pajamas at twenty-three below zero, enormously grateful for the three of us to be alive, but also stripped of all the “things” that spelled out memories and who we had been. Two weeks or so after the fire, we visited the cellarhole full of ash and rubble, hoping to find some small tokens — my mother’s locket? A toy, a book?

But in Glover, Vermont, the flames had towered high above our two-story schoolhouse, charring and blackening the trees around it. In the ashy remains collapsed into the cellar, the boys found a curiously whole little elf figure, perched on a stone — added by someone else? — and I found a fused lump that had been the ovals of glass inside Mom’s locket. The lump clung to the burned remains of its chain, all the gold vaporized off. Beyond the foundation, I found a piece of the cookie jar I’d used to smash the window to get us out of the inferno. And a teaspoon with the silver scorched off, last of a set of initialed spoons my grandfather collected with Shredded Wheat cereal coupons. I grew up with those spoons.

This is a chunk of the cookie jar that saved us. Window glass fused onto it at left, by the fire.