Thank You, Firefighters

Until today, it has been very strange up here - eerily quiet but for constant airtraffic over our house.

The constant flying overhead makes one grateful.

And then, after three, seven, nine hours...it puts one on edge.

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I wandered amongst my stuff. For three days a refugee in my own home. Our friends just two miles away suddenly as far as two hundred. We could not travel between houses within the boundaries of the evacuation; we could be escorted to the barrier - off the mountain.

Things that were not in the car but left behind to burn? Never to be seen again?

I scolded myself for not getting it the first time around. The picture of my father? Really? The pregnancy portrait? The photo album from college? The handmade quilt? The single malt scotch?

It all went into the already overstuffed car.

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Now everyone is moving their belongings back into houses which were all ransacked by ourselves....

The tension has been unbelievable, although no tears were shed until yesterday, when I left the mountain for the first time (finally free to go and return) for milk and a birthday party- and I found myself driving past the mailboxes all tagged with yellow caution tape - the mark of evacuation. Driving past the many many many many hand written and painted on cardboard signs which read simply:

THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS

That's when I choked up and lost it.

It was a relief cry.



We are so very lucky.