Sunday was the 7th anniversary of the Great Hoover Fire, a historical event you probably didn't learn about in school because it was a small house fire that happened only to me and my husband (and our downstairs neighbor and I guess our landlord).
Several months prior to the fire, Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast and caused a bunch of terrible weather elsewhere, including Cleveland, where an office boat (you heard me) just offshore downtown got ripped right off its moorings. At the time we were living on the second floor of a duplex in North Collinwood, not right on the lakeshore but close enough that we got the worst of the wind in any bad storm.
The day after the storm I called Cleveland Public Power to check on the line from the street to the house. A branch had fallen on it and it looked...wrong. And then either the power company looked at it and decided it was fine, or never got around to looking at it at all. For six months the power line rubbed against the aluminum siding on our house, the insulation wearing away until it wore all the way through and sparked and set the house on fire.
If you've never gotten a text at work saying "our house is on fire," well I don't recommend it. Our neighbor heard popping noises from the fire and called 911 and then my husband, and that is the only reason we didn't lose everything that day, including our dog. No one was home when the fire department arrived so they chopped through the exterior and interior doors with an ax and tore out most of the drywall in our breakfast nook. Everything was soaked. Mostly though it was just a huge mess.
This all happened at the worst possible time, logistically. Our landlord was in Croatia with his family, he dispatched his parents and a mysterious uncle who fixed our doors but did not speak (his mom did some of our laundry for reasons I now can't remember). My parents were on a cruise in the Panama Canal. My father-in-law was in Ireland. Not that we needed our parents, exactly, but "our house caught on fire" seemed like something they would have wanted to know.
When our landlord returned from Croatia he set about fixing the drywall in our kitchen. We liked him a lot, he was about our age, but having him in our apartment until 10pm on several occasions was not...convenient. One night, he paused in his work to come into the living room and watch CNN with us as the Boston Marathon bomber was apprehended.
There is always a lot going on in the world. Big news stories and small disasters. I remember walking into our ruined kitchen after the fire department let us back inside, and even as it dawned on me how incredibly lucky we'd been, I could see daylight through the structure of the house. Heaps of dirty wet plaster. Dust everywhere. Scorched siding all over the back yard and driveway. I thought, this will always be like this, we will never be able to clean this up. Now whoever lives there might not even know it had ever happened.
We hear this a lot lately but: this too shall pass. And really that's the only way I keep a hold of myself some days. The bread baking, the cake-making, the mask-sewing, it is all distraction, marking time until we get to the end of whatever is going to happen.
I gather these next few weeks will be a rough ride. This too shall pass. Hang in there, please.