What Remains (Maggie)

Most of you already know that I lost my beloved pals, Wrinkles and Sally, most of my possessions and about 90% of my home to fire last Thursday night. For those who don't, I'll recap briefly. Thursday night I was out. About 10:13 pm, my alarm system went off, indicating a housefire. Firefighters arrived within about 15 minutes, and I arrived only a few more minutes behind them, though at that point, I had no idea what was happening. I was beyond cell phone range while they were trying to call me. The volunteers from the Cuyler, Truxton, and Deruyter NY FDs tried valiantly to rescue the dogs, but they'd already succumbed to the carbon monoxide. No burns, thank goodness. And it looks as if there wasn't much time for either of them to suffer. It was fast. Those who've followed my blogs here have read lots of my tales about Wrinkles and Sally. Wrinkles was 14, far beyond the life expectancy of an English bulldog. She'd had an adventurous life that included one other adventure that involved firefighters, when she fell into an abandoned and thankfully, dry, well in 2006, and the South Otselic volunteers raced to my aid and managed to get her out again. Wrinkles' health has been going downhill rather rapidly and for quite some time now she's really done very little besides sleep. Sally was a great dane, and while I'd only had her a little over a year, she's been a friend for much longer. She was eleven, also an advanced age for her breed. She started out as my mother's dog, but that was brief. She ended up with my oldest daughter, Jena, and lived with her for 8 or 9 years quite happily. She and Jena went through thick and thin together. And every single time I visited, she would stick to me like glue. When Jena's first baby was born, Sally came to live with me as a precaution. She was nervous old girl and she'd snapped at small children twice over the course of her long life. We didn't want to risk her biting Sean, even though we knew it would be unintended and immediately regretted. (Sally could look more remorseful than any dog I've ever seen.) So she came to my house, and we were really happy together. She was an easy dog to love, with the way she would put her great big head into my lap, and turn it nearly upside down and start "talking" to me in Great Danish. Row-row-roo-roo-row!" The way she would still play with her toys as if she was a puppy. Sally's health has been beginning to decline too, though not as severely yet as Wrinkles' had. I think she had a few good years left, while I'm convinced Wrinkles' passing was imminent. I loved them both and I will miss them for a long, long time.

My kitty, Glory, survived intact, somehow, and for that, I'm grateful.

I'm not going to post a whole lot of photos here. I don't want this to be too terribly negative a blog post and the photos of the house are pretty dark. So I've only put up two of them.

Serenity is a mess right now, but she's still standing. The first floor, with the exception of the office area, will be have to be entirely gutted. On the second floor, two of the three bedrooms must likewise, be gutted. The bedroom that doesn't, and the upstairs bathroom, will need significant work. The furniture is nearly all gone. Actually, today's the day I have to meet with appraisers and make a list of everything that was inside the house that is gone. So I thought I would spend this morning reminding myself of what remains.


The office area of the first floor was once a two car garage. It's separated from the rest of the ground floor by a long entry hall, and a doorway that was, thankfully, closed. My office is pretty big. It has its own bathroom, with a jacuzzi tub and oversized shower stall, a double sink and huge mirror. That bathroom is unharmed, aside from the smoky smell all over everything. The office area also has a walk-in closet full, and its own entrance, French doors that lead out onto the deck. The deck too was unburned. And while the rest of the house is utterly ruined, everything that didn't burn being totally blackened with soot and ash, the office walls are still white. Dirty, but white. And everything that was inside the office is also safe. I'd just bought an elliptical, and my bowflex, purchased last year, was in there. Two desktop computers are probably all right. My futon, minus the mattress/cushion, survived. My desk and chair. A 27", old style tv, and cheap DVD player, and a stereo system all seem to be intact, though we can't test them until we have power.

The cleanup company believes they can clean that office section, and then let me use it as a self-contained apartment while the rest of the house is restored. And that's what I intend to do.

Most of my clothing survived. It all needs to be professionally cleaned to get the smoke smell out, and I have no doubt there will be a lot of items that can't be saved, particularly anything white or light colored. But still, a lot of the clothes will be fine once they're cleaned. Right now I have three pairs of jeans and the shirt I was wearing at the time, plus two tops, some socks, and a nighty I've picked up at Walmart since. I've been carrying all my clothes everywhere I go, in a bag I also bought at Walmart. I took my facial cleanser and moisturizers with me the first time I returned, then washed the containers thoroughly to rid them of the smell. And that's just about everything I have at the moment.

Up to now I've been hopping around, staying with the people closest to me, which includes my daughters, and kind switching back and forth from one night to the next. But it's been a week now, and this is not very efficient. Each place I stay is no less than a half hour from my house, and I'm constantly having to run back and forth to deal with insurance, cleanup, and investigative people. (Though how people with day jobs manage this, I'll never know. They seem to need me on site on a daily basis, whether the place is locked up or not!) At any rate, I had hoped things would move faster. I'd been told emergency power (just for the furnace and pump) would be restored Monday and my apartment area ready in a week. It's now been a week, and the power still isn't on. So I've booked myself a room at a gorgeous place in Cincinnatus, the town closest to my house. It's a bed & breakfast, and the owner, Mary seems absolutely delightful. I'll have a suite to myself, with no other guests on my floor, because this is the off season. My own bathroom, tv, wi-fi internet access, are included, and I'll be within cell phone range and only ten minutes from Serenity. I've booked it for two weeks beginning tomorrow (Friday.)
It'll be nice to have a place to hang the clothes I've been wearing and washing and wearing again, and not have to carry them with me everywhere I go. It'll be great to be close to home, and to have a "home base" to work from. It'll be great to be able to log on daily and get my email again, and especially, to begin writing again.

My laptop was destroyed, but some of my writing friends took up a collection to replace it for me, so I wouldn't have to wait for the insurance settlement to get a new one. My BFF Michele is taking me to do that on Saturday, and we're going to meet with some of my other wonderful sister-friends, who are dying to see me.

And everything is going to be okay.

My DVD collection looks, to the naked eye, as if it survived, though that cabinet was in the room where the fire started and they got very hot. We won't know until we try them. The cases didn't melt, though. My dishes in the kitchen cupboards, including the new holiday set the girls got me for Christmas, is black and sooted, but intact. A lot of my sculptures seem to be okay, beneath the soot, though with some I can't tell if the paint burned off or if they cracked from the heat, and won't know until I get them cleaned. My precious Iphone was with me, thank goodness, so it was saved. My Bunn Coffeemaker might be okay, but again, we won't know until we try it, and I wonder if there's even a way to clean the inside so the coffee won't taste like smoke? Many, many books are unburned, but smoke-laden and dirty. Whether we can get the smell out using tubs of kitty litter (a tip passed on by a friend) remains to be seen, but they aren't burned. My John Waterhouse prints, all framed, and some piece on canvas, were universally destroyed, and I really regret losing them more than nearly anything else, including the swan-fainting couch and the big screen TV, which melted.

But when it comes down to it, it's all just stuff, and while some of it was precious to me, and a handful of personal items with nothing but sentimental value, will never be able to replaced, most of it can be. I had excellent insurance coverage with full replacement value on the house and contents, with a company I'll probably never leave, if they come through the way it looks like they're going to.

So I choose to focus on the positive.
I wasn't home at the time of the fire. If I had been, I might not be posting this.

I had an alarm system that alerted the authorities, even when I couldn't do so myself. Interestingly, I'd burned some steaks only a few weeks prior, and had a false alarm, resolved with a quick phone call so no harm done. But a day or two later, the security people called to remind me to reset the system, which I'd forgotten to do. I did it, while on the line with them. If they hadn't made that extra call, I might never have gotten around to it before the fire, and things would have been far worse.

If I'd returned home even five or ten minutes sooner, and beaten the emergency vehicles there, I'd have gone inside after the dogs and possibly not made it back out. As it was, there were firemen there to prevent me doing that, though I tried.

I have great people in my life who are taking excellent care of me. I have a place to stay. I had more than 900 emails waiting the first time I got back on line, and my phone messages have to be retrieved daily, both on the home and cell lines, or the voicemail boxes overflow. People truly care.

My dogs didn't suffer. There may have been a minute, perhaps two, of fear for Sally. Just long enough for her to run upstairs, where she collapsed before she even reached my bedroom, where she was heading. I doubt there was even that much for Wrinkles, who was lying in her usual spot, where she was constantly napping, without a paw track in the soot around her, as if she never even woke up.

I have no doubt I would have been dealing with Wrinkles' loss before this year was out. Dogs don't live forever, and at Sally's age, we can't sure how much time she would have had. Maybe they'd have deteriorated gradually, growing less and less comfortable as I struggled with deciding how long to let it go on. Maybe. Who knows? I only know I was blessed to have them in my life at all, and I'm grateful for that opportunity. And while I'm suffering their loss now (as is everyone who ever met them) they are fine. They have crossed over into bliss, and total, absolute peace, and perfect alignment with source, and I know they're fine. I take a lot of comfort in that.

There are a lot of positives here. Serenity will be restored, and perhaps even be improved. Goodness knows there were a lot of little tweaks I was talking about doing, here and there, throughout the house, and those can be done all at once now in tandem with the repairing. My readers know I'm likely to get more than one story idea from this trauma. I was riveted while the arson investigators did their work, and even then, the girls downstairs seemed to be gathering bits and pieces to chew on for possible future use. (The cause, they think was a DVD/VCR that may have shorted out, though it wasn't ON at the time, it was plugged in--and there's a warning in that for us all. I hear leaving toasters plugged in causes a huge number of fires too!)

The thing is, I'm okay, and I'm glad of that, because while I have no fear of crossing that veil, I'm not done here yet. And when I think on it a bit, I realize that's because I've been enjoying the hell out of my life. Okay, so this was a bad episode. A very bad episode. But that's part of the ride, it's part of why we're here, for the adventure of it all. At the bottom of it all, at the very core of it, everything is fine. Nothing has changed. The dogs live on, just a different frequency and the rest is just a matter of a few months of inconvenience, and a new experience at riding out the storm. No, dancing in the rain.

Dancing in the ashes, in this case.

And I can do that.

I want to send out a great big thank you for all of the emails, message posts, phone calls, all the concern and worry and sympathy, all the positive energy and hopes and prayers from every one of you. It touches me deeply. But do not worry about me. I always land on my feet.

Much love,
Maggie