News of the Fire

I still don’t know if I want to write about this yet, but I’ve been working on insurance claims, so while my mind and heart are raw again, I might as well have a go.

Here above is the cutest little cabin that sat near the base of the Kolob Canyons section of Zion National Park, about .75 miles from exit 42 on the I-15 in Utah. Jonah’s family has owned the cabin for almost 20 years, and when we lived in Las Vegas and Saint George, we loved to go up there often. In fact, my kids were obsessed with “Kolob” as we called it. In 2005, we actually lived there for 6 months while we were building our house in Saint George.

When we moved from Saint George to New Zealand for six months and then to Washington, Jonah’s parents let us keep our most antique and special furniture (the only furniture we didn’t sell with the Saint George house) and our personal memorabilia there, as well as some more mundane things like some beds and washer and dryer and a bike… We helped furnish the house a little bit in exchange for them letting us keep our stuff there.  We also put my most excellent costume, antique dress, and hat collection and our Christmas decorations in the attic since we had no room in our moving trailer. Plus, Jonah’s dad had a “pre-inheritance” auction a few years ago where his kids bid with Monopoly money on what they wanted to inherit… and a many of the things Jonah won were in the house too. Oh, and a year’s worth of food storage for five people. And all of our financial records and the 1980s She-ra and My Little Ponies collections. Our college diplomas. And… and… and…

Jonah’s parents had some very, very valuable and sentimental Navajo rugs, furniture and artwork there too. They really had a lot of love and value in this home that they will never recover. Jonah’s dad especially loved this house. When they moved out of their home of 30 years in Salt Lake, he brought most of his most favorite things down to this cabin. My heart aches for them and their similar loss.

Ironically, we thought our things were safer in the cabin than in transit during our moves or sitting in our old farmhouse in Washington, and that’s why we had hadn’t moved them yet.

 

Jonah and I aren’t big stuff owners, and that’s why we are able to move often without a lot of boxes. BUT, we still had a couple chests of our most precious memories, journals and photo albums. Up above is my chest with my scrapbooks, art, and journals from writing every week from age 8 and EVERY DAY from ages 16-21. I could go on and on about the things that were there, because though not much, it was literally everything of material value to us in the world except  our hard drive, which we luckily had with us. I’ve had a few people say that it must feel like a little relief to be rid of  everything, which if it was all the junk that I had in my house in Washington or even the stuff I have in my house now, I might feel that way. But this was our history, our printed memories, and our treasures. It was everything that I had gathered, carefully organized, purged, made, drawn, and written down to share with my own children some day. I wanted to be able to remind myself of what I felt at their age, to laugh with them at our old ideas, and to have proof that I wasn’t always as old as I am now. I wanted to always have record of the moments of enlightenment in my life, of the times when my testimony of the Gospel came into fruition, and the times when the Light overcame my darkest hours.

Jonah was a prolific record keeper as well, and his memory isn’t as good as mine so he truly feels like some of his life has just wafted away. Jonah and I are especially overwhelmed because our wedding albums were there too, and Ana was the only kid who is old enough to even remember looking at them. I really could fill a book with just a list of the things that were lost, even in this small cabin where there wasn’t even a sign of what was actually contained in the secret cubbies and chests and attic.

If you were told to evacuate your house in one hour and you could only take a truck load, think of everything you would grab. That’s everything of ours that was in this house.

So, when we were at Sea World with our kids and Jonah’s dad called us to tell us the news, he didn’t know how truly devastating the news would be. I sat down and cried and cried. I still do. We were supposed to be at the cabin in one week to pick up some stuff and see what we needed to ship to Hawaii.

It was just a grass fire that moved fast and hot. Man made? No one knows. The neighbors across the ditch only had time to get in their car and go. They lost some outbuildings, a car, and a cat.

Sometimes it feels like my heart has a burned hole in it. I keep trying to tell myself how grateful I am that no one was hurt and that we still have our memories and ourselves. But, then I just have to let myself mourn-- tragically and deeply feel the pain of the loss. It overwhelms us at times. Sometimes we just walk around in a grumpy state, snapping at each other until we realize we need to just mourn it out. I don’t know why it is so present in our minds, especially since we hadn’t even looked at some of the stuff for the last couple years, but I think it might be the guilt. Guilt is a nasty fiend when you are mourning for something, isn’t it? I could have… I should have…

How will this play out in our lives from now? At first we were very proactive and made goals together of how we would mitigate the loss and what we would do to make up for what we lost. What were our real purposes in owning and creating those things? How could we attempt to replicate that or even make it better? What really mattered? We came up with an idea of buying a professional quality video camera and doing a video history. Maybe travel to relatives and friends’ houses and interview them to help fill the gaps? We thought maybe we should try to gather photos from friends and relatives and make new online photo albums. But since we’ve jumped back into real life, we barely have time to document our present. I hope we have the time and energy to tackle both. I’ve always tried to document things as they happen, so this will be a change to write about events in the past. But, I want our past to matter, and I want to continue to share it with the people for whom it matters, so we are going to do our best to be honest and conscientious and joyful about this regathering.

It healed and helped a lot to visit the cabin, and I’ll write about that soon. Sorry for the sad post, but I do feel better to write it down. Looking forward now. Onward and upward!