On the way home from meeting today, I saw this burned-out mobile home on New River Road:

           


According to Ethel, this trailer was not burned yesterday.

Which means sometime - probably last night; it seems that fires happen a lot at night - these folks went from "warm, safe and happy in their home" to "standing outside in the cold looking at everything they own turn into smoke".

That's gotta be traumatic, indeed - going from "here I am, here's my couch, there's my books, there's my table, there's my Football Watching Device" to "oh, my God - it's on fire!" to "it's all gone...." - in just a few minutes.

Two nights ago, we had a "fire" in our house. It was the dryer - a small spot in the back of our (new - well, 1.5 year old) Whirlpool Cabrio dryer caught on fire. It freaked Ethel out - she tried to pick up the dryer and carry it outside. The only real result of this effort was that she messed up her knee, which she is supposed to be going easy on so that she can ski the bumps when we get back to Durango.

I put the fire out, and we're waiting to hear from an appliance guy who'll be looking at the dryer tomorrow. A friend who understands such things says that it may be a short....even if that fire had continued unabated, it would have burned out in a few minutes, and it would still have just cost us the trip to fix the dryer.

These folks lost everything in their home, and they lost their home. Now they are in some strange place, along with whatever possessions they managed to grab on their way out of the house.

I hope nobody was hurt. That's the sort of thing that situations like this make you realize - it's okay, if nobody got hurt. Stuff is really, really, just stuff. There are things that can be precious to us - until it's time to save a person, or save the thing.

Ethel and I have been gathering a lot of stuff lately - just buying the condo got us a lot of stuff. Suddenly, we have an entire household of extra stuff - suddenly, I have two kitchens, two living rooms, another bedroom and bathroom that just happen to be five hundred miles away.

I like my stuff. But I like Ethel and Silas more. And my dog. And even the other two dogs are more important than just stuff (okay, maybe Lucy the World's Dumbest Cocker Spaniel isn't worth, say, a good paperback novel - but the paperback novel won't be in pain if it burns, and Lucy would be, so I'd probably save her first).

And I'm grateful that I am not standing outside of my house, looking at it with a hole burned through the roof.