Of Fire & Mercy
There’s nothing like being in survival mode to get you sober, off that high of life that can be misleading, detaching you from the mediocre, the material. I can only really attest to my personal experience with this, and feel sheepish sometimes talking about it, but lately my writing obsessions have turned to ways I can share my life with others--with those I love and those who don’t love me back, per se, but maybe need to hear a message of hope or change or destruction, and what comes of it. When I start writing about other people’s survival, I get on shaky ground, but here goes. At 5 am on a recent September morning, my husband woke me and gently said we need evacuate--our next door neighbor’s house was on fire. The panic that welled in my chest was a surprise even to me--and hours later, sitting and writing about this, I wonder what I would have done had we been the ones fire had chosen this particular moment. This reaction I pushed down to put on a straight face for Isabella, ...