We were packing to
drive back to Pennsylvania when the phone call came. I sensed something was
very wrong by the wrinkle of my husband’s brow and his response to the caller:
“You must be mistaken. We’re in Iowa.” Trying not to panic me, he ended the
call and said, “That was the Red Cross in State College, saying they are sorry
for our loss.”
“What loss?” I asked.
“They said our house burned down.” My
first thought was of our cat, alone in the house over the holidays. . . .it was
only later that the rest of what we had lost began to occur to me. As we drove
the 14 hours between my childhood home and the wreckage we would face when we
reached Pennsylvania, I looked resentfully at the houses we passed: They had
not spontaneously combusted the morning after Christmas.
The months that
followed were a blur.
Living in a hotel and then a furnished apartment, buying
just enough to get by, but still filling shopping carts with everything we no
longer owned, starting over. And thinking what it meant to lose everything, or
almost everything; watching others respond to the news; listening to those who
had been in town on the morning of the fire to see the dramatic blaze in Park
Forest. I was on sabbatical; there was time to think–more time, possibly, than
I truly desired. Time to think about possessions and needs and what matters
most. . . to know that the things I missed were the irreplaceable personal
things–the art made by my students, the books, the photos of my son growing up,
the letters from my mentor and the drawing made for me by her mentor. Eventually I realized that I knew
those things so well, treasured them so deeply for the circumstances that
brought them into my possession, that I didn’t really need the things
themselves: I have the memories, the vivid impressions of events, encounters,
conversations shared, spaces visited and venerated by the presence of people I
love.
During this time, I
found a card that sits on a shelf in my office: “The barn’s burnt down. Now I
can see the moon.” It
reminds me that even the most traumatic losses beckon us to see life from
perspectives that were obstructed by the way things used to be, and to realize
that we can begin again.
Image credit: "Barn's burnt down, Now I can see the moon." ~ Mizuta Masahide (1657-1723), quoted in Modern Japanese Haiku by Stryk.
