31

The furnace exploded the Sunday following Thanksgiving. We had spent all day Saturday setting up the Christmas train set. While we were at Quaker Meeting Sunday morning, a ball of smoldering ash burped out of the furnace, settled in the wooden joists, and burned off the kitchen addition. When the firemen had the blaze out, we tromped through the rest of the house. Water, broken glass, and black soot covered everything. We scooped up our clothes with the stench of smoke in them and went to our friends, the Dripps.

Neighbors and friends found their way to the Dripps and carted home the smelly clothes, laundered them, and brought them back. The Dripps fed us and put us up for the night. Our parents drove from West Virginia, picked up the kids, and drove them back to their house. The next couple of days my husband and I moved some sleeping bags and towels and groceries into an empty apartment. Wick had the flu so he slept with relief; I had the heebie-jeebies so I didn’t sleep.

The next morning before dawn we were awakened by pounding on the window from the fire escape.

“Your house is on fire.”

“That‘s a mistake. It burned last Sunday.”

“No, ma’am. We just got a call from the Fire Department.”

We drove to the house in disbelief. Embedded in the orange flames against a black sky was a teetering wall of bricks: someone had eviscerated our house.

I remember going to friends for breakfast and falling asleep on the sofa. The next three weeks I can’t remember anything except that the insurance man asked me whether I set the house on fire.

What I do remember are the innumerable ways that people came to help us. Neighbors stopped on the road and handed us cash. The Community Club collected household goods. One lady sent a check from Florida. Many local churches sent checks. A clothing manufacturer sent a carton full of clothes in our five sizes.

A friend found a crib and a high chair for our toddler. Our daughter’s kindergarten collected spices. The next door widower offered my pick of her clothes. My sister dug out negatives of family photos and had copies made. My sister-in-law sent serving dishes. People didn’t ask, “What do you want me to do?” They gave what they would have missed.

One lady pulled up to our apartment in a station wagon filled with toys she had collected from her neighbors. The children had never seen so many toys before. She said they could keep what they wanted and get rid of the rest. The children kept them all.

It was Christmas and we hadn’t a moment to think about it. We had no presents for our relatives or for each other. We had no decorations, no furniture, no tree. A rubber tree from the office was dragged in and decorated with a string of lights. The kids made cardboard candy canes with baling string loops and hung them on the rubber tree.

The Sunday before Christmas we went to Meeting. There was a fat spruce in the center of the room covered with ornaments and piled high underneath with presents. When Silent Worship was over a member announced that the spruce and the presents were for us.

We spent the month following Christmas opening a few presents each day, curious to know who sent them and calmed by the thoughtfulness. A few had cards and good wishes, but most were anonymous so that we wouldn’t have to thank anyone. Each person gave something he or she valued: The Joy of Cooking, a hammer and hook, an embroidered tree ornament, some venison sausage.

We did not give a thing to anyone that year. We did not cook or bake, invite friends over, buy presents for our children or take them to shows and shopping malls. We received everything. From friends and neighbors, from people we had never met before and some we have never seen since, from a community we didn’t know we had, came kindness without our ever having to ask. 37 years later I still have that Joy of Cooking, in tatters, but I won’t replace it.

When I was a child my mother pounded it into me that it was better to give than to receive. But that once I learned a different lesson: there are times when it is better to receive.