My Chickens and a Hard Drive

i’ve definitely thought about it before, i bet most of us have....if your house was going to burn down and you could only grab the essentials, what would you take?  

my house didn’t burn down last night, but it was a very real possibility that it might.  and at 3:00am, with police yelling at us to evacuate and Will instructing me to grab only the essentials, all i remember saying in my stumbling daze was “what does that even mean??...”  my chickens were in the backyard and i couldn't much think of anything else.  i had soaked the area around their coop, for lack of anything more helpful to do, and left the water running to make use of the leak in the connecting joint.  then we had to go. 

i got my laptop, forgot my external hard drive, and stumbled upstairs in pursuit of “irreplaceables” with will’s calm but assertive guidance.  i should know where my birth certificate is, but at the moment i don’t.  passport?  social security card?  purse and phone seemed like good ideas.  it was cold outside; i packed a scarf.  and i was unbelievably thirsty so i filled my water bottle.  the rest?.....?

the threat of losing “everything” came down to a hard drive and my chickens.  Will and i were together and safe, and because of that knew that whatever else happened we would get through it and be ok.

60 firefighters kept our neighborhood from burning down.  the wind was tremendous and they managed to keep even the houses on either side from being completely destroyed.  three of the people made it out of the house; the fourth did not.  

we got to come back home.  and never have i ever been so grateful to walk through my front door.  sleep wasn’t about to happen so we made tea and folded clean clothes.  i washed some dishes.  we curled up on the sofa and watched arrested development, as it seemed the only logical thing we could think of to do.  around 5:30am we finally crawled back in bed, and attempted sleep that wouldn’t come. 

we don’t need all this stuff.  it’s people that matter, and we’ve been humbly inspired to start spending more time with our friends and loved ones.  we’ve been reminded how quickly things can be taken away.  

we’ve also been reminded that we’re not special, that tragedies are happening all the time, all over the world, and that no matter what happens to us we are still incredibly fortunate to be who we are and to live where we live.  as scary as it can be i appreciate real glimpses of what people go through, so that i may feel real empathy, beyond just the textbook version of “i can’t even imagine....”  we don’t want to imagine (and can’t!), because if we could we might explode from comprehending the suffering of the world, the bad things that happen to good people as well as the bad things that happen to "bad" people.      

be kind to strangers.  be mindful of what you don’t know.  be grateful for blessings that surround you every day.

and if you have chickens, for god sakes go and hug them.