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Illustration by Christine Wei
Even as our house burned, I resolved to be the kind of person who would focus not on what we would undoubtedly be lost but rather, on what we would ultimately gain from the fire. This has proven to be one of those things that’s much, much easier said than done.
It was more than just a house. From the outside, our red home perched on the perfect little corner of the perfect little lane looks exactly the same. Walk closer, and the smell of smoke hits before even opening the front door. I didn’t know that smoke could do what’s been done here. None of us did, really. But it happened all the same. For every well-intentioned person who tells me things are replaceable, I struggle to explain the pervasive sense of grief these things, and this house, now represent.
This was our safe space. Two decades of carefully curated treasures, items that tell a story of a marriage, a birth, a family, a life. These items, these walls, these fixtures, these rooms became the physical manifestation of my own dream: offer my daughter the kind of stability that reminds her even on your worst days, you can always, always come home.
Here we are, though, on our very worst days: 128 of them in a row. All we want is the one thing I cannot deliver. We want to go home.
In the meantime, I walk.
I wasn’t wearing sneakers the day of the fire. They showed up, all on their own, in the week that followed. A loan from a friend. She wasn’t using the sneakers. They were mine for the time being. Hot pink laces. Light blue trim. The renewed ability to hit the pavement, one foot after the other, feel the certainty of the concrete below and move forward, destination unknown.
I walk and I cry. For the image of my husband, running into the fire again and again, desperate to stop the spread of the flames. I cry because he was relentless. I cry because I know he did it for me, to save the photos, to save what was. I walk and I weep at the memory of our neighbour, following my husband into the house. A father with three tiny people and a wife watching from the road, walking into the black smoke to keep one hand on the doorframe, ready to pull my husband out.
I cry for the kindness of the firefighters, people I’ve known all my life, whose empathy was palpable as I stood screaming in my front yard. I cry for every time someone has told me at least we survived. Because my father-in-law died in the week that followed, and I really don’t know where to put that grief at all. Two unrelated losses now forever entwined.
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I walk and I smile at strangers. This is not my neighbourhood. No one knows me here. At home, though, in my little village by the lake, there are no strangers. Whether I walk at dawn or dusk, there is always someone to smile at, wave to or chat with. I walk and I smile and I hope that they’ll smile back.
I walk and I laugh. Sometimes, psychotically. At the absurdity of it all. We plugged in a speaker to charge and the damn house burned down. It makes no sense. I’m surprised that laughter can co-exist in the same space as so much sadness. I laugh over the funny little things that I notice along my route. A tiny dog in a bright yellow coat. A crowd of kids, calling for me to find their lost soccer ball and toss it back over the schoolyard fence. A memory from before that finds its way up to the surface and makes me giggle for no real reason at all.
I walk and I search. For the ah-ha moments or life lessons I intended to find the day of the fire. I walk, and I look down at these shoes, and I realize just in the mere fact of their existence – the possibility they represent, the momentum they’re building: maybe what comes of this doesn’t have to be found. Maybe, just maybe, it was there all along.
In the friend who called her mom and asked for the shoes. In the book club-turned-meal train that fed us so many nights in a row. In the women who drove an hour to my temporary doorstep, armed with clothes and books and flowers and anything else they could think of that might help. In the phone calls, the cards, the messages. In the sense that the safe space I created for my daughter, and my family, was also an inflection point for friendship and family and community and love. The kind that envelops us as we wait to see what’s next; a feeling that stands in for the home we so desperately miss; the father, father-in-law and grandfather whose celebration of life we intend to hold soon.
I walk and I cry. I smile and laugh. I search and I find the gratitude that’s always been there but feels a little different these days.
A gratitude more permanent than smoke. A gratitude for everything. Especially the shoes.
Amanda Olliver lives in Hudson, Que.
