Jarring

I was feeling a little melancholy last night. Well, more like on the verge of a lot of melancholy. I can usually tell when it's about to happen, and I make preparations. I did the dishes, grabbed my little iPod and found some mood-changing music (this time it was something to make me feel tough....dont' laugh....), put on my purple polka dot pajamas and headed for my porch. It was dark and chilly and rainy. Perfect.
I heard sirens in the distance. Then they got closer. But they stopped and I was busy being whatever I felt like being at that moment. More sirens. Hmmm. It was a busy night, I supposed. We don't live too far from a bar or two, and on a Friday night, you hear things.
Then I heard a really loud boom. I took my ear buds out and looked around. It sounded like one of the boys (Drew had a buddy over for an Xbox "sleep"over) had picked up the sofa, climbed up on top of the cabinets and dropped it. Or a gunshot. That was a scarier, if more plausible, thought. But no one was screaming or running on my street or anywhere nearby, so I uneasily put in my ear buds again.
More sirens.
I decided to go inside. As I did, a man walked up on my porch. I hope that sentence scared you as much as the event scared me. The good news is that it was my husband. Only, I didn't know this at first. He had been in the backyard investigating the happenings. There was a house on fire two streets over. You could see the flames from our back yard he told me with urgency. He was going to "check it out." Which is guy talk for, "This is a terrible thing, but it's way too cool for me to miss out on!"
So he ran down the street and I ran to the back yard, and saw the smoke and sparks and embers. I caught my breath and cried. That pulled me right out of my selfish little melancholy.
I called the boys outside and we held hands and prayed for the family and for the firemen. They went back inside and I just stayed in the back yard and watched the embers disappear, the smoke turn to black, the smoke turn to gray....eventually to white. It mixed in with the fast-moving film of clouds floating across the face of the moon. Chris came home eventually. He concluded that the explosion was probably electrical. I concluded it may have been the top floor of the house collapsing. Whatever.
I live in a neighborhood of old, wood-frame homes. That could have easily been mine. Last week was Fire Safety Week at the kids' school. I kinda fibbed a little bit about how often we practice fire drills and how intact our fire escape plan is on all the forms I had to fill out. I think I'm going to make good on those empty promises now.

<3 Christy