Celebration: Safety

Yesterday, while on a walk with my niece and nephew in my in-laws' neighborhood, I noticed smoke rising from the back of one of the houses we were passing. It smelled like the charcoal my grandpa uses in his barbecue so I thought that's what it was at first, that it had just gotten a little out of hand and started smoking. Then I noticed smoke had begun pouring out of the vents in the house's attic. And then I noticed smoke streaming out of the corner of one of the upstairs windows, and rising up to combine with the increasingly engorged cloud of gray smoke in the sky. I reached for my cellphone, but it wasn't in any of my pockets. Then I noticed that in the few minutes it had taken me to notice all these things my nephew, who has the energy of an antelope, had somehow propelled himself so far down the street that he was nearly invisible. It was a strange moment, where everything seems drawn out, slowed down. I felt the responsibility over my nephew's safety and the responsibility to address the emergency taking place in front of me, and the panic of not knowing how to respond to both.

Luckily, Jordan rode up just then on his dad's bike. He called 911 and I shepherded the children back to my in-laws' house. Some neighbors came outside to see what was happening and were able to get the owners of the burning house on the phone to find out what to save, and a neighbor broke into the house and rescued the dog and an urn. The fire department arrived quickly and immediately went to work. Luckily no one was harmed, though their tiny dog will probably never like the smell of barbecue again. Jordan's parents don't know the owners of the house very well, and the family will probably never know who exactly helped them out, but I was really grateful for Jordan's timely arrival on the scene. And most of all, I was grateful that everyone was safe. Since I was a little kid, the idea of fires like that has been darkly terrifying for me. Though it seems like the inside of their house was almost completely destroyed and they likely lost many things of sentimental value, it's nice to know that all that was lost were things.