The Fire of Transformation

Six months ago we had a fire. It was a freezing cold, wildly windy night. Hany turned the pellet stove off for the night and went to bed. A few minutes later he smelled smoke, then saw an orange haze out the window. He got out with our puppy unharmed, thank God.

I was in Brooklyn, already asleep. When I spoke to him the next morning his voice shook as he said something terrible happened. I thought someone had died. When I got home it seemed the damage wasn’t too bad — just the corner where the pellet stove had been was gone. But smoke had seeped into every crevice, and then the water and shattered windows and gashed support columns from the fire department doing their good work.

Insurance adjusters and investigators came and went, followed by a remediation crew who worked diligently but somehow made things worse, sealing in smoke debris, stirring up asbestos, destroying our clothes that they sent to be cleaned and art they failed to properly store. We hired a Public Adjustor, someone who fights with insurance companies so you don’t have to.

Six months later, our home stands completely gutted, stripped to the studs and floorboards, waiting for renovation to finally start.

We’ve been living in a 23-foot trailer with two puppies (we were scheduled to get the second, a Pyrenean Mastiff, a few weeks after the fire and couldn’t give her up). Meanwhile I was scheduled to start graduate school in May and went ahead with it. Somehow we’ve been somehow making it all work.

Fire is the element transformation, compelling us to detach from whatever has not been serving us, even when that may feel like a mystery, and embrace the emptiness that holds space for the fertile energy that fuels new beginnings. As we struggle to make a home in the shadow of our barren house, as exhaustion looms and tempers run short, we remind ourselves to visualize the renewed home we will soon inhabit and keep telling ourselves: if we can get through this we can get through most anything.