Ablaze

Funny how quickly things can get shoved into perspective.

I was feeling mildly irritated: Alex seems to have a cold or a sinus infection, and it's raining out. Penny dragged her feet on leaving the house and then had trouble getting her seatbelt fastened, so we wound up behind a school bus on our way to take Alex to daycare. And then we had to wait for a train crossing, featuring one of those insanely long trains with three engines and like four or five hundred cars. Alex pulled a sock off in the car, and I couldn't find it (though I did find a sock he'd pulled off a couple of weeks ago). The father of one of Penny's best friends at the daycare wanted to stop and talk to me -- in the rain -- about a possible sleepover for the girls this weekend. The same no-passing road that we'd been behind the school bus on the way to daycare had a guy on the way back who didn't want to go faster than twenty. And about the time we got to Penny's school (late, of course), the rain decided to increase its intensity. And leaving the school, I wound up behind someone who apparently had never turned out of a parking lot before in their life, because they wouldn't pull forward far enough to actually see the oncoming traffic. It took them -- no joke -- three minutes of sitting there to feel comfortable enough to pull out onto the street. And then they gave me a dirty look when I passed them. The hell?

As I approached my turn, I saw a low, very dark cloud hanging over the street, and made a face: a specially-heavy bit of rain just to complicate matters?

But no, it wasn't. It wasn't a cloud at all. It was smoke. Lots of it, thick and billowing and black. Something was burning. Who burns leaves on a rainy morning like this? I wondered, and then I saw the flashing lights.

Three houses down one of the side streets, I caught just a glimpse as I went by of a house in flames. I didn't see many details, but it looked like the entire house was gutted. The flames were a huge orange sheet across the front of the house, reaching half a story higher than the roof.

When we first moved into our house, almost ten years ago, that was my biggest fear. The Mutant Worrybrain wasted endless cycles, every time we left, on the possibility that we would return to a smoldering ruin. I used to crane my neck to check the sky, and I looked diligently between the houses on the adjacent street to make sure it was still standing. I fretted when one of those houses put up a fence that made it harder for me to see our place.

It was 8:21. Were the residents of the house on their way to work and school, blissfully unaware of what waits them this evening? Or had they been home? Trapped in their beds by that malevolent orange and black?

From the top of the overpass, as I circled around, I could see the flashing lights, and the orange again, through the trees. At the light, I had to wait longer than usual because of a parade of additional police and fire and ambulance vehicles.

I wasn't irritated any more, though.