BE-COMING HOME: sifting through the rubble

And a special thanks for not burning up the whole ship. Including yourself, you daft bum-rag.
[Scott Westerfeld, LEVIATHAN]

The weeks following the fire were a mind-numbing blur.  We spent all day every day pin-balling from one essential task to the next, while simultaneously trying to come to terms with our shock and disorientation.

Remembering, naming, mourning and letting things go was (and still is) a huge part of the process.  Returning to The Ruin, as we called it, to rummage through the heaps of winter-wet ashes, pry charred remnants of our history from the sooty edges of disaster, and occasionally unearth a buried treasure from the muck was part of the process, too.  Ample attention has been paid to precious things lost.  This post is about the survivors.

Some items survived because they had the sense not to be in the house at the time.  My car, my keys, my purse, my all-purpose work folder with contact sheets, production calendars and my class schedule was with me at 1^st Dress rehearsal for Beauty and the Beast, as was my stage manager kit – a fish & tackle box filled with goodies like a Leatherman, mini-medical kit, mini-sewing kit, flashlight, and assorted office supplies.

I snagged this souvenir matchbox from a terrific restaurant (with a terrific name) on a summer 2000 trip to the East Coast.  It’s alive because it was living in my car.

Fortunately for our Cnbson china plate, I’d forgotten it at my sister’s after a family feast.

Just weeks before the fire, I lent these books to my friend Claudia.  Both are from my college days.  I’m particularly happy the duct-taped, falling-apart, note-filled, Auden-translated ELDER EDDA eluded the flames.

In fact, the items above didn’t survive the flames, but rather, escaped them.  The true survivors are the things that suffered and somehow endured the fire-storm.

Our friend Blair had a bunch of his belongings stored in the workshop under the house.  Everything else in the basement was incinerated, but despite that Blair’s boxes were literally on the other side of the wall from where the blaze started, most of his stuff took more damage from water than from fire.  We were able to return him a few books, a bit of sheet music, his harmonicas, a couple of notebooks filled with his writings and poetry, and some irreplaceable family photos.

Wait, I lied.  Something from the basement did survive, though not in its entirety.  This stag’s head was one of the two handles of the silver Stag Bowl – the renowned bowl we  annually lifted to the New Sun, the cup of good cheer we shared with family and friends every Midwinter’s Eve from 1981 through 2011.  “And to Her all things must return…”

These items fell from the kitchen garden-window to the exterior stairs below.  The three hand-blasted stones were gifts from Jim Strand.  The Tree of Life is faintly visible on the big triangle, as is the knot-work on the rectangular piece, and the embossed Chinese character for “Faith” on the third chunk could not be plainer.  The shell is no longer white, but is still entirely lovely.  The heat cracked the interior of the big teardrop prism, altering, but not lessening its beauty.  And the clay piggy bank, a present Helen brought us back from Mexico, darkened considerably, but survived intact.

No strangers to fire, the ceramics had the best chances of survival.  This little Bryn-made bowl was a thrilling find.  For decades, I’ve used it to serve up milk to the Good Folk on the holidays.  It’s deeply comforting to be able to maintain continuity in this small way.

After The Ruin was leveled, I found these bits from of another of Bryn’s works of ceramic art buried in the dirt.  They not only survived the fire, but also the treacherous fall from the upstairs bathroom and the demolition guys’ heavy machinery.

When whole, it was a circular base adorned with 3 seated female figures.  I kept it on the tile shelf by the upstairs tub and burned stick-incense in it when I bathed.  The found pieces fit exactly… if only I’d found them all.

The flames took its lustre and color, but it’s still possible to make out the vase’s subtle, Asian-esque swallow-and-leaf design.   This gift from Stephany and Suzanne lived in the office, on top of the piano, home to a spray of dried pussy willows.

The post-fire office was a rare sight.  The blaze devoured the floor, leaving only the humongous beams that had supported the floor spanning the dirt and rock of the hillside.  During the fire, one of my swords – a machete-like Chinese dao – plunged from the bedroom above and fell blade-first into one of the beams.  Cruelly warped and perfectly poised, it sat solitary in the center of the room, a fire-wrought work of art.

The fringes of the office were small mountains of ash, most of it burnt paper that had rained down from the erstwhile attic.  Reaching over the low, ragged skirt of wall that remained and into the sooty slope, I successfully extricated a bunch of yearbooks, some very old, badly damaged family photos, and my Uncle Mort’s 8^th grade autograph book, which I was pleased to pass on to my cousin.

What we really wanted to get at was the filing cabinet, tauntingly close, yet completely out of reach on the far side of the room.  The drawers’ wooden exteriors were badly charred, but there was a chance their contents were ok.

When at last we did gain access, our fondest hopes were realized.  Tons of papers survived; singed at the edges, water-logged, but otherwise totally viable.  Ironically, the items that didn’t make it weren’t victims of the fire.  They were done-in by the water from the fire-fighters’ hoses.  We recovered passports and birth certificates, our immunization records, school records, cherished letters from friends and relations and our own letters, some penned by Roy in Vietnam, others by me in Ireland.

Among the other filing cabinet wonders was this very old family Hagaddah.  It took a bad hit at the edges, but the print is sharp and clear.

Even the illustrations

and post-Seder party songs made it through the conflagration.

This journal was a gift from my sister.  The pages hold the tale of Bryn’s birth and her first year.

Another major file-cabinet survivor is this ancient, blue binder – the repository of my earliest writings.

Though most of the prose, poetry and lyrics from my Jr. High and High School days is atrocious, some efforts aren’t  half bad,

while others plainly attest to the SciFi/Fantasy direction my more polished, adult writings would eventually take.

The wreck of Neil’s room boasted a twisted  hunk of bed, a charred dresser containing seared and sodden clothing, and some burnt bookshelves littered with ruined board-games.  Oddly, while the tin that held Neil’s childhood rock collection was in great shape, its contents were reduced to charcoal.  His many Magic cards were also in surprisingly good condition, but not truly salvageable.  The authentic survival story from Neil’s room is the wooden axe (wooden axe?) he’d acquired on a youthful jaunt to the Renaissance Faire.

We had a straight visual shot through the demolished wall of Neil’s bedroom to the kitchen, where one of our new-ish copper-bottomed, stainless steel pots sat glinting on the gutted kitchen counter.  Apparently unfazed by fire or the fall, the pot was a slightly misleading beacon of culinary hope.  When Roy finally got inside the house, he discovered many survivor-pots and pans hiding in the cupboards, but none were unscathed, and we recycled the lot…

… save for this cookie cutter.  This particular kitchen utensil has been in the family for at least 50 years.  When Li and I divided up the kitchen goods after mom died, it happened to go to me.   Every gingerbread man I’ve ever made has been made with this cutter – and, as many of you know, I’ve made lots of gingerbread men.

Some of you may be secretly scoffing at the “ooh-magic!” aspect of these survival tales.  Some might argue that having lost so much, I’m naturally imbuing every recovered item with mystical powers and historical significance.  I beg to differ.  I owned many cookie-cutters.  All were easily replaceable, and none held any memories or meaning for me, let alone memories to rival those embodied in this bit of tin.

Which brings me to the small closet at the bottom of the stairs – the magic cupboard.  Not only did it stand in the part of the house where the fire burned hottest, nearly everything in it was highly flammable.  Tarot decks, candles, corn dollies, incense, wicker baskets, wands, feathers, dry gourds, bowls, seeds, stones and bones occupied the top shelves, old cassette tapes and wrapping paper lived below.  Standing outside the house where the north wall had been and peering into the closet from a reverse-angle, it was painfully apparent that the closet had been ravaged by the flames.  I was absolutely sure nothing had survived.

Happily, I was absolutely wrong.  I’d written off the magic cupboard as a total loss, but unbeknownst to me, the intrepid heroes Neil and Ian set off on a treasure hunt to this especially dangerous section of The Ruin, and oh! what treasures they found! This tiny, Bryn-made jar came through none the worse for wear, save for a single smudge.

They recovered this Made-in-India wooden box (again, wooden?!?).  Its exterior was seriously blackened and whitened, but otherwise fine.

I fullly expected the inside of the box would be as charred as the outside.  Not so.  I opened the lid to find the swaddling swatch of green velvet soft, unstained and unsoiled. To my keen delight, on unwrapping the cloth, I found all 12 omen-stones in pristine condition.

There were three Black Books in the magic cupboard, identical cardboard-and-paper journals.  One was Roy’s Book of Shadows (his hand-written collection of rituals), one was mine, the third was my store of pagan lore – stone and plant magic, songs, runes, dreams, elements, colors, celestial associations, all that stuff.

For whatever reason, Roy’s was vaporized, but the boys found both of my Books intact, save for the covers.  Intact and legible.  Unbelievable.  Blessed Be.

As the demolition got underway, hitherto hidden items sometimes came to light. The crew  kindly left any found-objects in plain view on a big rock in the backyard.  Mostly they found old plastic cars and trucks that the kids of the previous occupants had left scattered (or intentionally buried?) all over the place.  But they also found this gold chain with three medallions; I believe they were my Nana’s.

Last, but certainly not least, they returned me this Tibetan necklace.  I was told this piece was specially intended for someone who manifested leadership in the community.  I’d bought it for Bryn when she was maybe 5 years old, way too young to wear it, but I felt sure she’d grow into it.  Sadly, the amulet that hung from the cord – an intricately-designed wrought-metal rectangle with two, small curved claws at its base – was not recovered.  But the gorgeous, cloth-beaded rope-chain is remarkably and exquisitely unharmed; even the colors survived.

We didn’t lose everything in the fire, so.   These few, dear things defied the flames, and are with us still.