Smoke billowed above dry grass. Strangers plopped chairs on our lawn as if the wildfire on the mountainside were a weekend game at the park. My parents were on a trip to California. I was thirteen. My older brother politely told the spectators to leave because the flames might raze our neighborhood. When more people arrived, my other brother sprayed them with the garden hose. The strangers finally left when the firefighters used the empty lot next door to access the rocky slopes. By nightfall our street was evacuated, so my brothers and I loaded the Suburban and drove to a relative’s house further in town. As we descended the foothills, I stared out the rear window. The flames crisscrossed along the mountain like a snake devouring pines.
An ex-convict confessed he ignited the fire. He said he was desperate and preferred prison to an empty stomach. He also said he didn’t want to hurt anyone.
When we returned, ash welcomed us home. Ash coated the table, the piano, the carpet. Ash rested on the roof. Ash had scorched pockmarks on the trampoline.
In our absence, the firefighters had barely kept back the flames. Uncomfortably close to our sooty metal fence, the fire had seared a border of burnt dirt.
***
Today, fifteen years after the wildfire, I again live in my childhood home, this time in a suite above the garage. I chop a pungent onion as I prepare dinner. Meanwhile my daughter squeezes herself into the low pantry cupboard and embarks on a make-believe adventure.
But my mind rattles up fears. My former neighbor, a renter in an antique home, turned on the heat one fall morning and hopped in the shower, but the furnace exploded and she dashed out, shrieking and naked. A woman at church regretfully filed a restraining order against her violent son. My friend’s mother decayed from brain cancer and died while we were in high school. And a struggling ex-convict ignited the mountain.
One day, I think, the flames will not stop at my fence.
***
When the evacuation order was lifted, we made every effort to remove the evidence of the fire. My brothers and I wiped the ash from the furniture and vacuumed the carpet. After my parents’ return, my mother placed tall air purifiers throughout the house to lessen the smell. My father soon replaced the trampoline. Upon seeing the dirt behind the fence, he also made a donation to the fire department.
But the flames had left a scar upon the mountainside, which I could see from my bedroom window. In that gray, colorless autumn, a charred tree fell by the stream. When the winter thawed, in a seemingly meaningless moment, the ants visited. The following year, a little moss grew on the underside, and the frogs slept. After dozens, perhaps hundreds, of meaningless moments, that dead log hummed with life.
***
“I home!” My daughter announces her return from Narnia as she pushes the stool toward me. She asks to dump the onions into the pot—but only after one or two bites, and I let her. “Hot!” She pants and points to her tongue.
As I pour the milk, I’m relieved that my present moment requires nothing of me but to smile and pass a cup to my daughter. This return to reality is my rickety metal fire escape down from the spiraling, tragic unknowns lurking somewhere in the future. She clutches the handles of her sippy cup with her tiny, strong hands, the adventurous unknowns from the world in the cupboard already gone from her mind. As we stand in our kitchen, I sense this meaningless moment together is, in fact, full of meaning.
I stir the onions that now hiss on the stove. My daughter downs the milk, soothing her tongue. We smile briefly at each other, two links in a fence surrounded by wild beauty, a fence that will one day face flames, a fence I pray will stretch further than I can see.