I Couldn't Find the Words

I couldn’t find the words to describe and make meaning of the last five weeks of my life. Until this morning.

After a night of restless sleep and anxious wakefulness, whole sentences and partial paragraphs dropped into my head.

Five weeks ago, I was enjoying dinner with my husband, Chip, my two adult sons, Casey and Andy, and Andy’s girlfriend, Heather. It was our last night together before our beloved offspring and significant other would fly out, returning to their homes across the country. We made bouillabaisse, played bridge, and nibbled on the last of the Christmas cookies and sweets. It marked the end of a lovely holiday gathering and the final evening we would enjoy in our home of 30 years as a family.?Chip and I had sold our house in November, and had been leasing back before moving to Iowa in January.

The next day, on Dec 30, after dropping off Andy and Heather at the Denver airport, we returned to our house in Louisville, with a low level of anxiety. On the way to the airport, we had seen what looked like a dust storm. On the return trip, the puff of smoke had turned into a tower. It was a fire.

As we headed into our subdivision, I felt a tug to seek shelter.

We had one more trip to the airport later that day, to drop off Casey.

The signals that this was not an ordinary brush fire came within minutes of each other.?Chip got dressed to go for his daily walk and as he opened the door, he was assaulted by the campfire smell. As he hosed down the house, ash fell. I looked down our street, to the west, to see a grey plume, taking up a large portion of the sky. The wind was kicking up. The weatherman had forecast gusts up to 100 mph. The light coming through our large living room windows made an orange glow on our carpet.?The 1-800-Got-Junk person called to reschedule the pickup of an old mattress. His dispatcher was rerouting him to avoid Louisville. Television reports reported a brush fire in our area, but not much more.?On Twitter, I saw reports of the brush fire about 6 miles away, moving east, toward Louisville and Superior. It was garbage day and trash cans had overturned. Loose debris was flying down the street.

When I saw a tweet that the bushes in the Costco parking lot were on fire, just 2.5 miles from our house, Chip and I made the decision to leave. I remember saying clearly, “Casey, we’re leaving.” We packed up our station wagon with boxes of photo albums and important papers that had been set aside for the move. I grabbed a couple of pairs of pants, a coat, and two tops with the thought, “Clothes are replaceable.” Casey took a box of dried fruit and nuts that we had received as a Christmas present from Chip’s brother. Before we pulled out of the garage, I dashed into the house one more time. I hastily poured homemade granola into a bag, spilling half of it on the floor.

Less than an hour after returning from the airport, Chip, Casey and I evacuated the house we had lived in for decades.

Four weeks ago, I boarded a plane to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with grief and relief. Our house had been untouched by the fire, spared by the capriciousness of mighty winds fueling the inferno. Two days after the fire, our neighborhood looked peaceful under a fluffy blanket of snow. We were lucky. There were hundreds of houses within walking distance of our neighborhood that had been reduced to ashes. A half a mile away, next door to my sister’s home, four houses in a row burned down.

Remarkably, we were able to stick to our plan for the move, within days of evacuating. As Chip started driving to Iowa, I greeted the movers who packed up our house.

There were some things that we didn’t plan for on moving day. The heat had been turned off by the power company (it was 41 degrees inside) and we had shut off the water to prevent bursting pipes. One of the movers was a local fire fighter who had been awake for 36 hours straight. He had been on a moving job in Boulder, when he heard it was all hands on deck at the firehouse.

I had planned for the normal stress of relocating out of state and had recruited my sister, sister-in-law and a friend to help. I did not plan on coping with the trauma of evacuating. I had difficulty putting two sentences together. I couldn’t remember where I had put things. At the airport, I had trouble figuring out how to self-tag my bag. I called it “stupid brain”.?When the movers told me they could finish a day early, I looked to the trusted women in my life to tell me what I should do. They were my brain that day.

On the day that I left Louisville, I saw parts of the town that were no longer recognizable, and wept. There were only charred fields where rows of houses once stood. The Enclave, Harper Lake, Coal Creek South. These are areas that were so familiar because they had been the backdrop to daily life—on the way to the senior center where my parents lived for 8 years, dropping off my sons at a home day care when they were babies and toddlers, going to the neighborhood pool on hot days when the kids were grade schoolers, running errands in Boulder, building back strength and muscle as a fifty-something at the local gym. How many times had I passed by these neighborhoods on the way to someplace else, without a thought that they wouldn’t be there someday?

I felt like I was leaving a war zone, for the safety and normalcy of a faraway place called Iowa.

I’ll write more soon, about my transition to living in Iowa, after this dramatic ending in Colorado. For now, this seems enough.

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To the many people who reached out to me after hearing about the Marshall fire, thank you. Your texts, emails, voicemails, LinkedIn and Facebook messages and phone calls have meant so much to me. It brought me a special joy to re-connect with friends and family who I had not heard from in years. ?

If you’d like to help those impacted by the Marshall fire, I recommend the Boulder County Wildfire Fund, run by a respected non-profit, Community Foundation Boulder County. Click here to donate . ?