continuing on..........

While I was in Vancouver, talking with my daughter on the phone, I learned that she had most of my instruments with her.....but they were "charcoal", and that she had the burnt boxes of my records and they looked as though they had melted together. I had asked her whether or not anything from the "memorial wall" had survived and about a special picture I had hanging on the kitchen wall. I had learned by then, that when there was a loooong pause before she answered......the answer was "no". This time she simply said....."You don't understand Mom, there is NO wall there." I understood.

She also told me that she had taken pictures and made me PROMISE to go directly from the airport to her house, before going to see my house. After I had my "base" set up at the campground AND the portable player to keep the music ON....I studied the pictures.

The following day, myself and a good friend went to the house. We went out to breakfast first....and I gave her some specific information about how to best help me hold together.
She had those "tears of relief" in her eyes.....and told me that she had been so worried about me and felt inadequate...cause she simply didn't know how to help this time.
She had been with me through my brother's death and my partner's death, and knew full well that crises have a cumulative effect on a human being.

She had also let me borrow her "Walkman" tape player for my trip to Ontario/Vancouver. One of the things I explained to her was that if I put the Walkman earphones on when we went to the house, it was simply my way of taking a Valium and breathing.

My daughter's pictures helped LOTS in initially seeing the reality of the devastation.

When a fire dept. puts out a fire..they throw EVERYTHING still burning out the window. The pictures had given me a clue that burnt things were all over the yard.....but I just wasn't prepared for how HIGH the piles were.

One of the piles was about one story high.....outside the dining room windows.
The pile was black soot-mud.....and I could see the remnants of a few things. The charred leg of a chair, my refrigerator-which took a while to recognize because it was black, my desk chair, some insulation and interior wall framing, what was left of my computor.....and my keyboard etc.

My friend is an artist and thought that the keyboard was a neat "art object". All the keys had bubbled up individually....(and NO I didn't save it.)

We decided we had enough for the day (she decided I had enough)....and started to leave. I glanced back at the pile and spotted, near the bottom of the pile sticking out a bit, the corner of a record album.

We tried to pull it out, but the weight of the entire pile was on top of it...it was getting dark out and starting to rain.....and I had to agree that we should leave and "chill" out at the campground.....and come back the following day.

heck of a time to take a break from typing...be back in a bit to continue