Saturday will be 5 years since we lost everything in our fire at our apartment on Glenwood Street. It’s kind of a morbid anniversary to remember, but it’s not something that’s easily forgotten.  I had just finished doing the wash and was bringing bags of clean laundry upstairs when I heard the smoke detector in the basement start to go off.  I got up to my apartment and stood in my doorway for a minute, listening to the beeping of the smoke detector.  I threw my laundry in my apartment and turned around and went downstairs.  The beeping didn’t seem to be coming from either of the basement apartments.  I went back upstairs and paused in my doorway.  The woman across the hallway opened her door and looked at me.  “Do you… do you hear something, do you smell, something?” I asked her.  “I smell smoke,” she replied.  I looked down at the floor of her apartment and saw smoke rising and I pointed.  “Do you have a land line?” I asked her.  She nodded her head and I told her that I only had a cell phone so she better call 911 since cell phones weren’t e911 compliant.  Why did I think of that at that moment?  Who knows.

I left my neighbor as she was dialing 911 and I went to the front two apartments and then upstairs to knock on the apartment doors.  “Hello!  The smoke detector is going off in the basement and I think there’s a fire.  We’ve called 911 and we have to leave the building!” I shouted at the doors.  No one answered.  It was early evening on a Sunday in June – no one was home.  I went back down to the first floor and walked down the hallway towards my apartment.  I went downstairs to the basement to knock on the two apartment doors downstairs.  No answers again.  I turned back towards the stairs and paused.  I looked down the hallway towards the back of the basement and curiousity took hold.  I saw smoke curling up in the light streaming through the window at the back of the basement.  I took two steps towards the back and then two things happened that made me stop.  The lights suddenly went out in the building (leaving me standing in a dark, smokey basement) and the neighbor upstairs that I’d been talking to ran down the hallway to the front of the building yelling, “GET OUT! GET OUT! THERE’S A FIRE!!”  I turned around and hurried back up the stairs.

I got in my apartment and stared at the smoke now coming up through my floorboards.  I was frozen for a second trying to decide if it was really happening.  I looked around for my cat, Molly.  She ran away from me as I rushed towards her.  I finally grabbed her and was able to wrestle her into a soft sided cat carrier (word of advice: keep a hard cat carrier around… stuffing a cat into a fabric cat carrier while you’re trying to rush out of a burning building is not easy or fun).  I grabbed my car keys and my purse, which I slung over my body, and tucked the cat carrier under my arm.  As I was leaving my apartment, my phone rang and, oddly enough, I answered it.  I said hello and then listened to Beck for a minute – I have no idea what she was saying – and then said, “Yeah, um, I’ve gotta go… my apartment’s on fire.”

I got outside and put the cat in my car and cracked the windows so she wouldn’t suffocate in the oppressive heat.  I walked around to the side of the building, watching the smoke get heavier and I called Alex, who was working at Mohawk Ambulance that day.

“Yeah?” he answered – he was on a call.

“Hey Hon -” I started and he interrupted me, “Babe, I gotta go, we just got called out.”

“Yeah?” I asked, “Is it for a fire?”

“Yeah,” he responded.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s our house.”

I continued walking around to the front of the building and got there right about the time the first fire truck came screaming up the street.  When they asked where the fire was, I told them that it was in the back left corner of the basement, and that they’d be better off going through the garage door (which was on the basement level) than going in the front door because to get to the basement from the first floor you’d have to go all the way down the hallway to get to the stairs, then come down the stairs and then turn around and go all the way to the back of the building (a giant Z, basically).  I was ignored.  Alex arrived in the ambulance and stood with me, looking at the building.  We watched for the next few hours while the fire got worse.  Black smoke billowed out of the windows.  Flames licked the sides of the building.  I was standing by my neighbors back porch when something in her apartment exploded, sending a couple firefighters sailing backwards as they were attempting to enter the building from that entrance.  Alex and I stood and watched as everything we owned was destroyed.

I remember thinking that it all seemed very surreal.  I didn’t believe that it was happening when I was still inside the apartment – I actually remember thinking that I was being stupid for getting the cat out since it was “just smoke” in the basement.  Turns out, where there’s smoke there actually is fire.  I’d only been out of the building for less than five minutes when the little bit of smoke had turned into black smoke and flames.

Now, five years later, the fire is still a part of our lives.  I don’t think there’s a week that goes by that I don’t find myself saying, “…yeah we used to have [insert item here] but it burned.”  There are things that we lost that I still miss.  Particular items of clothing stand out in my mind – a blue and gold button down peasant shirt, the Guinness fitted rugby shirt that I got in Dublin, a hot pink t-shirt (and the hot pink bra that matched), a pink ruched button down… I definitely dressed better before the fire.  Sigh.  I miss our Pottery Barn-esque khaki slipcovered overstuffed sofa and the bright red armoire our TV was in.  I miss the brand new dark brown pub height butterfly leaf table from our dining room.

Sometimes I look at the pictures from when we were able to get back into the apartment and remember the things that we used to have.  Everything looks horror scene awful in the pictures.  It was horror scene awful – and it smelled terrible.  We had to catalog everything for the insurance claim.  I had a mini tape recorder and I walked around the apartment speaking out everything that I saw.  All around me was the wreckage of what used to be our stuff.  It was a hot, humid, nasty week in June and it smelled terrible.  What an awful task that was.  I look back on it now and I can’t believe that, at 26, I was able to handle all that.

And that’s one of the good things that resulted from the fire.  I realized that I can handle pretty much anything.  I’m one of those people who is calm in a crisis and can deal with the aftermath.  I proved that again earlier this year (unfortunately).  The other positive thing that resulted from the fire was the solidification of my relationship with Alex.  It helped us realize that we were a unit – a strong, solid couple who got through tough times without falling apart.  Alex told me when he proposed that it was really the fire that made him realize that we were going to be together forever.  And really, what could be a better result of a terrible event than that?