Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-05-06 - 9:43 p.m.

Odds and Ends

I can't keep a thought in my head for more then a minute. But then, I couldn't do that BEFORE the fire.

There's more to do in a day than there is day to do it in. I think I was full before this. Now there's a whole other shift of picking through things and phoning all my newfound friends at the planning department and the power company and the salvage company to see how they are doing today. But today - today! the electricity is on. Oh blessed electricity - I had borrowed some from the neighbors for a while. Sometimes I go over there with an empty cup, for sugar; sometimes I go with one end of a hopeful extension cord. I have good neighbors.

So I've been able to run one light and a fan. But now I can run a million fans, and lights. But a million zillion fans, no, a googolplex of fans, would not touch this particular little hygiene problem.

Here is the smell: if you dragged a dead horse into your livingroom, not today's dead horse but let's say last month's dead horse, and if that horse had been eating a lot of cabbage when it died, and maybe the cabbage had fermented and exploded and that's what killed the horse, and you put old Goodyear tires all around this horse full of fermented cabbage and doused it with the cheapest lighter fluid you could buy, and closed all the windows and tossed a lit match and ran, in two hours that room would still smell better than my livingroom does right now.

Do I sound ungrateful? Betcher ass.

No, I'm not really. Yes I am.

I am, I am, I am grateful that we're all okay. Except this freakin' foot that hurts like a mofo. I am thankful that my children are whole and well. Except that the little one now cries at loud noises and the bigger one doesn't want to talk about it at all because it's OVER and she was never UPSET at all, she just happens to think that it's all my fault that she doesn't have the clothes she needs.

I am eternally grateful for the friends who have taken us in. It's hard to live in someone's house. I have no razor. I don't know what there is for the kids to snack on. I want to shower in my own shower. I want my bed.

I am thankful for the school that gave my children a little extra time on their assignments, and the elementary teacher that gave my younger kid almost fifteen minutes of class time to tell about what had happened, and the P.E. teacher who understood why she came to school in flip-flops because that's all she had. And I won't forget the middle-school teacher who sent my child to the office for a tardy slip for being three minutes late this morning- coming from someone else's sofa, with the wrong clothes, her eyes all red from crying. She says it's her second tardy - I didn't remember her having one this year; she said, "No, I had one in third grade, remember?" THAT'S what it meant to the kid - why did the teacher have to do this?

I am deeply grateful for the friends who have written and called and sent love and offers of help and support. I don't know how I will ever pay this back, ever have enough to give; not one of these people would ever expect me to, ever, that's not why they do it, but it's so hard taking help - I don't know how to do that - I have a list in front of me of places who help people in my position, Red Cross and Salvation Army and Season of Sharing and more, and those are the hardest calls to make; I haven't made them.

I am thankful that the damage was so slight, such a small part of the house actually burned. So many people have suffered much worse in home fires. Ours was tiny. And I'm uninsured, and the smoke, water, and firefighting damage combined with the fire has made my house uninhabitable, and it will take us a long time to make that right again.

It's all mixed. I can whine here - I am whining here - because in other places I am busy being the plucky mommy that has glued sequins all over her shoe-brace, helped her kids see the adventurous side of sleeping on people's couches, and who jokes about needing a haircut anyway. But at night I sit down with the kids and cry because I'm tired and scared and displaced too, and while I know it will all be behind us in a while, I want it over RIGHT NOW.

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