On my watch – What To Grab In a Fire?
By Anne W. Semmes
There is a frightening image takeaway from those California fires, of a homeowner seeing her photo albums on fire with photos aflame flying down the street past the skeletons of houses. Other families hurry off with works of art, paintings, heirlooms of sorts. The desperation is seen of the homeowners, their arms full of precious parts of their lives. It all brought back that family tragedy in my youth when my grandmother Mamá’s house burned to the ground.
Her lovely Georgian style house was next door to ours in backcountry. And on the night of the fire, my two big sisters and 1 had watched it burn from our upstairs balcony. The tall flames lit up the sky, and the smoke choked us and lingered for two days. My family could only stand in the front yard with my grandmother, clad in her bathrobe – a dreary tableau, watching her beautiful and elegant new house burn to the ground. We never knew what the cause was. The guess was something electrical, but it was never proven.
Mamá had been sleeping soundly in her big four-poster when she smelled smoke and she and her housekeeper, Lizzie, had to run for their lives. She even had to leave her little dog behind who made a wrong turn. Gone were a house filled will antiques and Orientals and paintings gathered over a lifetime of travel and accumulated good taste. And especially gone were her generation of photographs that would have been so intriguing for her descendants to see!
To replace her lost furnishings in her next house rebuilt on site Mamá went to the local antique stories, but the glamour of her earlier possessions was gone, and the comparisons continued down through the years. ”But you should have seen the first mahogany dining table, the first Chippendale chairs, the first Persian rugs they would say. My mother would often suddenly remember a piece of silver here, a rare piece of ivory there, and say, ”Oh, yes, they were lost in the fire.”
There were only three items found intact in the rubble. Of my generation I’ve come away with two of the three – a small figurine, an Italian blue and green enameled dinner bell my grandmother used to summon the help at dinner, and a small pink porcelain cream pitcher that sits on my dressing table, scorched on one side. They are Pompeian treasures.
For residents like myself directions for escaping a home-on-fire does not include saving the things I love so much, and for me that is my photographs of a lifetime. I have that Grab and Go direction sheet that includes: Basic Electronics like phone charger, a LED flashlight. Backup eyeglasses, birth certificate, driver license, credit cards, Medicare cards, marriage certification. But nowhere does it list photographs!
Yes, I understand I am not of the generation that has their lifetime of photos on their Iphones. I am of the generation that has an attic full of albums and boxes upon boxes of loose photographs, all awaiting organizing! Must this caustic and catastrophic California fire be alerting me that I must choose a selection of photos that tell my story and that of my children and friends all in one carriable album?
I so love theme albums, of travels, of family events. And I’m busily building an album of my soccer star granddaughter photos of her playing through the years! My kids are not likely to peruse my travel articles, but surely, they would get a kick out of my Amazon trips, of seeing me zip-wire flying from one rainforest tree to another. Or traipsing across the Sahara Desert determining where to plant a million trees!
But, yes, there is that silver necklace with a pendant holding a precious photo of my brother Tommy, aged 8, who died before I was born. And then there’s that photo of me and my young son standing next to Vice President George H.W. Bush before his fireplace mantel in Kennebunkport, Maine. And, surely on my grab list must be that small surviving pink porcelain cream pitcher!
