A Slow Burn

The day is vivid, the story stark.  

I am opting to forgo glib introductions today; today I will give a candid account of an indelible scar imprinted on my life still with legs, still walking around the neural sidewalks of my memory park, occasionally, sitting down on a veined sentiment bench to reminisce and remind me. 

Snow. It was snowing. Only lightly. Iowa was quite white, grey and cold the winter of 2010. Tiny flakes, little bitty snowflake babies, fell lazily from the sky all that February morning but the ground was not yet covered on Teatree Avenue in Davenport. 

Inside the small home there sitting on the corner of a quiet downtown corner was a deeply unhappy little family following their daily routines. 

Who did not wake up that morning thinking they would be homeless when they went to bed that night. Who did not know the warmth they would feel later that afternoon, in contrast to the cold, would be from the embers of their burning home. 

No one plans a fire. No one wishes for one. 

But they do come.  

With heat, they melt memories. With flame, they torch hope. With an endless hunger, they snack on possessions. And with smoke, they permeate all else destroying with smell what, after all damage is done, may still yet hold color. 

We were poor. Not a struggling poor, working-to-make-ends-meet kind of poor; we had passed that point already. We were legitimately pauperized. By that I mean more than just in money. Bankrupted spirits, no happy heart savings left over, all joyful nuts gathered in the summer season of Life already shucked and gone in the now very frigid season of existence. 

We were... collectively impoverished. 

*** 

We moved into the house in May of 2009.  

Originally built in 1914, it was a hodgepodge architectural disaster, the original home having had several additions mis-matchedly attached to it like a kind of crab covered in barnacles. You knew it was a... a house, but the barnacles made it tough to understand exactly what kind—on the outside, anyway.  

It was still good eating inside. 

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, they say. And to me and my little family, this was treasure, indeed, despite it having not been treated kindly. 

It was our first home wrapped up in a rent-to-own contract, the first time we would be living in a house we could fix up and call our own.  

And boy, did it need fixing! 

I look back at the pictures I have secretly housed on my Facebook page in an album called “The Old, but New, Mott Home”.  

A nasty, obtusely stained mattress stood against the wall in the dining room screaming to be put out of its smelly misery. A broken table full of debris stood in the living room, an already decaying recliner pulled up to it as if someone had last played some kind of trash chess – a bag of Cascade pods being a very checked king. 

The top of the stairs was the dumpster of the house it seemed though I could not, for the life of me, understand why folks would chuck the trash up the stairs when they could have just thrown it down the trap cellar door that was the small hallway connecting the dining room to the kitchen. 

Yes. You heard me right.  

Apparently, the house, at one time, had a set of outside cellar doors. When they built the kitchen on, it is my guess a Hiroshima brainfart occurred and the designer struggled with a solution to having indoor access to the underground space they would modernly dub the “laundry room”. 

So, I think he just said, “fuck it!”, gave up, and threw down a sticky vinyl-covered plywood plank with a handle and rolled with it. 

It was rather nutty. At the time, I had five babies aged 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and though we loved Dr. Seuss, I was totally not up for the newer version of “Door in the Floor” which I imagined would end with “...and then there were four”. 

No, thank you. 

A young couple with a boatload of kids who had been nomadic for seven years jumping from rental house to rental house, we saw these challenges, yes, but rose above them for the hope of a home and nesting place to call our own. 

It was sweet, really. Our optimism. 

We married in 2002 and lived in Westminster, MD in a cozy apartment where Liam was born. Skipping over the state line to a bigger little duplex in Hanover, PA, I then had Isabelle. A very bad decision took us to Johnstown, PA and, when I was seven months along with Othniel (kid numbe three), emergent trauma brought us to Montpelier, IA where he was born. Horror chucked us into an upstairs apartment above a “working lady's” establishment in downtown Davenport and that’s where I had my fourth kiddo and second daughter, Mirabelle.  

The landlady of the last apartment, being a Christian woman who felt badly for the location of our family (in addition to the working women out front, it was also a three-story walkup and, of course, I was again preggo), had a house on 10th Street come available and offered us to move there. And we did and were happy to welcome our last kiddo, Leif, into the world in that house. 

We had moved six times in six years. With a perpetually growing brood of tiny people, it was HARD. Packing boxes and lugging them in and out of doors, while usually also pregnant. Most of the moves were without family or help and duct-taping the kids to the wall to keep them out of the way was a constant temptation. 

A modern nomadic Little House on the Prairie, I made Laura Ingles Wilder look like child’s play. 

So yeah, when we found this icky gem, we figured trash could be whisked away in bins, paint was a thing and a positive, stabilizing fresh start was just the thing we needed.  

We were so happy, so excited to find this pearl. 

Hubby was a roofer by trade, I was a homemaker by birth. He ripped off the roof and put up a fence outside while I dug into the shell house and cleaned the mustard out of our manky crab of a home. Together, we shampooed carpets, cut and replaced pieces of moldy dry wall, bought new blinds for the windows and locks for the doors, repainted walls and turned that hated hovel into a cutesy-poopsy happy haven complete with a tiny hole in the backyard where Isabelle was finally going to achieve her 4-year old dream of digging a hole to China. 

It was a good time but the decline came fast and hard.  

I have talked to my therapist, at length, about my life asking him if I am cursed. At 47, if you come into my attic (THIRD FLOOR!) bedroom right now and look around, you will see I keep only what will fit into two suitcases. Even today, at a moment’s notice, I am prepared to go at all times. 

I do not trust life. I do not trust reality to not shift instantly. 

Part of the blame does lie at the feet of all the moves we made... but the fire itself? It pulled the trigger of the gun of distrust and, when it went off, that part of me would be its victim. 

Hubby lost his job. With all the movement over the past six years, hubby had lost, or quit, many jobs. But this job was a good one, a stable one, which had allowed us to propel forward. He was laid off this time. He tried to get others but jobs in Davenport, Iowa, in the beginning of winter, for a blue-collar worker with five kids, were scarce.  

Of course, money went bye-bye quickly. 

I grew up in a Christian home. I wanted to go to college—I dreamed, even then, of being a writer or a nurse. But dad and mom believed women, biblically, should be under the authority of a father or husband and I, a good kind of trusting girl, was disappointed in their decision but understood. Even still, I offered hubby to let me get a night job at the Save-a-Lot just down the street but he, too, believed a woman should be under a husband and not in the working world. 

My job was my babies. And yes... I did love my work but even I - a genuinely, naturally happy person – began to buckle under the strain.  

We were able to get food stamps which meant we could eat. That helped some of the stress. 

But not all. 

And then hubby turned dark.  

I did not know what depression was at the time. Had never seen it as I had always kind of been a fountain of serotonin making the best of every move, being an army of positivity for my family. We had even lived, for a period of time, in an old schoolroom. Literally. With chalkboards and old radiators I had known in 5th grade. After mortification passed, I managed to turn that into a laugh-y place and you could often find the kids and I racing office chairs up and down the hallways were children once raced to class. 

Hubby began to find solace in conspiracy theories maniacally watching elongated documentaries by Alex Jones on Ruby Ridge, Waco and the 9/11 Twin Towers. He would make me watch them and I would cry and cry at the sadness and death unable to wrap my head around the ideas behind any of it. 

Books showed up. I thumbed through the “Anarchist’s Cookbook” trying to understand why anyone would write a book on how to make homemade bombs. And then wondered why my husband would buy one.  

Fluoride was bad; we changed toothpastes. I grew concerned about teeth.  

Stop drinking the city water – “they’re” trying to “dumb” us down. I grew terrified of water. 

Chemtrails - “Look at the sky, Shane. See that? See that streak? That’s not natural.” I became scared of the sky.  

Vaccinations, no. My kids are not vaccinated. I am afraid of Autism.  

The moon landing was a hoax. “What?” I was devastated. My 10-year old self used to beg my mom to let me go to space camp. As a kid, I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut. And we never went to the moon? My whole childhood dream a lie? 

Every conversation dominated by conspiracies, fear, growing hatred for a government which had my children in its sights. And we had no money, he could get no job, my kids started crying more and more as they felt the underlying energy in the home shift from hopeful optimism to abysmal negativity in the foreshadowing of our life in a military compound when the shit hit the fan. 

Without realizing it, I became less and less of a person and more and more of a robot as I moved through my day.  

For heat, hubby decided to install a wood-burning stove in our tiny living room. We were nearing being unable to pay the electric bill and wind-chills often dipped below 0 in Iowa. We scoured behind grocery stores and shops for wooden pallets to use for firewood. They burned so quickly, and we needed so many--this became almost a full-time job.  

Inside the home grew as dark and as black as the frozen winter night sky.  

At some point, I began to pray. I began to ask God to let me die. Both of our families were on the East coast. Somehow, in my despair, I reasoned that if I died, hubby would have to take the children back home. Back to where there were blue skies and a warm sun, big hugs and fluffy daffodils, country goats and loving grandparents. 

I was sad for a while. Then went beyond sad. Beyond sad is despair. But beyond despair is numb. 

I went there. To numb. Because the alternative – to feel – hurt and used up too much energy which needed to be conserved for making dinner or bathing the babies. 

The matches to light the stove were in hubby’s office where I also kept the coloring books, artsy items and school supplies for the kids. Each morning when he would leave, hubby would light the stove for me and place the matches into the lock box in his office.  

Despite not having a job, he would go to the “library” every day to use the internet to do more “research”. I didn’t care where he went anymore, frankly. 

On this lightly snowy whited-out afternoon, Leif was upstairs in his crib napping while Oth and Mira were downstairs also napping in the living room bundled up near the wood stove on the floor in sleeping bags. My bedroom was just off the living room. Liam, Isabelle and I were under the covers in my bed with a laptop playing Insaniquarium, a game where one must feed fish and destroy monsters who would gobble them up. It was a game that made the kids laugh; I did not want them to wake the other children, so I pushed the door such that heat could still come in yet kept some of the noise from escaping. 

So, when I heard the scream of Othniel tearing down the stairs, I was shocked. 

I knew him to be downstairs, not up. 

Immediately I went to him. Wildly screaming, red face, shaking like a leaf in hurricane, he was trying to run past me while I held him on the steps. 

“What’s wrong, Oth? Oth! What happened? What’s wrong? Calm down, buddy. What happened?” 

His blood-curdling scream of a response in a voice, if I heard behind a wall I would not recognize as my own son, came: “FIRE!” 

By now, at this, the other three who were then standing behind me beholding the scene began screaming, crying, shaking. 

I have often wondered if my, at the time, current, cold, numb state of mind helped me. I had no panic response. I did not freak out. No screaming, crying, or shaking for me. Not even a crazy sense of urgency. Everything seemed to slow down, logic gears churned and auto-responses took over just as I remembered Smokey the Bear in 4th grade had taught me – stop, drop and roll. 

I smiled at the babies.  

“Hey now... sit down. Come on. Everyone come to the middle of the room. Great. Thank you. Now, Oth... sit down. Come on. Breathe..... what’s on fire, honey?” 

“The mattress, mommy.” He was blubbering yet but calmer. “The mattress!” 

“Okay. Mommy needs to go check so I need everyone to sit down right here. Come on. Sit down. Now, don’t move, okay? Liam – can you make sure everyone stays?” 

Liam, who suddenly was a very mature 6-year old, nodded.  

I went upstairs. Turned into the girl’s room. The mattress was more smoky than on fire at that time and I surveyed the scene, thinking. The window in the room, being tall – I thought I could open it and perhaps throw the mattress out onto the large concrete parking pad below. There was no foilage, all was frozen even if not snowy and I figured the mattress could burn itself out there easily with minimal damage. 

I knew explaining it to the neighbors would be a hurdle but I let that thought go immediately. 

I grabbed the mattress, turned it on its side and slid it over. But when I went to lift the window, I had forgotten it was nailed shut. Being built in 1914, the windows were very old, the glass thin, and sat only six inches off the floor. We were always afraid one of the kids would open it, lean on the screen and fall out. Hence the nail. And breaking the glass wouldn’t help – the wooden frame I could not break. 

By now, the smoky mattress was showing real signs of fire, the top of the room becoming devoid of oxygen and I started coughing. 

Okay, next plan.  

Fire department. Kids to safety. Check. 

I went to Leif who was still sleeping in the boy’s room, picked him up out of his crib and ducked below the cloud of smoke I could now clearly see by a defined line of dark grey. Rejoining the children in the living room, who had re-positioned themselves in a sobbing sibling comfort huddle, I called 911, gave my address and reported the fire. 

I knew I had time. The fire had not yet dug into the walls, was still centralized in the mattress.  

But there was now a dilemma which, speaking it now, seems unimportant but, at the time, was a eye-opener.  

Our washer and dryer had both blown up the month before. I know, right? Both of them. In the same month. 

In addition, in the same month, the car I could drive? Our new mini-van we had bought over the summer? It had been t-boned by another driver who had lost control of his car on black ice. Since our vehicle was so new, the insurance had been kind enough to pay the loan on it, but not enough to make a down payment on another.  

The car hubby used was an old automatic Datsun-style truck. Initially, he would take the laundry to the laundromat, wash and dry it, and bring it home for me to fold and put away which worked fine. 

But then, a couple of weeks later, still that same damn month, hubby was on a ladder fixing the stovepipe from the outside, fell off the ladder into the ice and broke his arm. 

Meaning, he could not drive. Also, I could not drive having never learned how to operate an automatic shifter.  

And we couldn’t fit seven of us into his truck so I could quickly learn to drive.  

Which meant... we had no way to do laundry even though I did wash our underwear in the sink as best I could.  

Total meaning: no washer and dryer + no way to wash and dry clothes / we dug into the summer tubs for clean clothes x a fire in February Iowa temps = omg, what do I do? 

My kids were sitting there in shorts, t-shirts and mismatched socks.  

How did I get here? How far had we fallen?  

In a moment, in a fire, in which I should have probably been on the hysterical side, I saw - with precise clarity and felt acutely – a sudden profound sense of consummate failure. On all points - maternal, personal, marital, and as a supposed Christian. 

As stunning as it was, I also knew I didn’t have that much time. 

I could visibly see the line of smoke snaking down the stairs filling the top of the living room. I shoved the sense aside for the practical: we need to get to safety. 

“Sit right here, babies. Momma is gonna go get your coats and shoes, okay? Just sit still. Everything is okay but it’s cold outside. We need jackets, yeah?” 

Thankfully they agreed and, fortunately, I was a neat-as-a-pin housemarm so those were lined up just around the corner on hooks all in a tidy row. As I heard the whirring of the siren in the distance, knowing help was just a few minutes away, I bundled the babies as best I could and herded them to the door to stand and wait just under the smoky cloud. 

Patches of time have sort of disappeared over the years. Flurries of people, not snow, covered our driveway. Helmets instead of knit caps were all around. Red-faced adults with a giant water gun instead of flushed kids playing with snowballs were running around in my yard. 

Leif on my left hip, Mira on my right, Isabelle with a death grip on my right leg, Liam holding onto the left. Poor Oth with his face buried into the middle of my skirt, I leaned on the fire truck for support as I stood there watching thick, swirling tornadoes of smoke gush out of the girl’s bedroom window.  

“You can’t stand being in there either, can you?” I mentally asked it.  

I felt nothing.  

Except for concern for the babies and the maternal duty to soothe, I had no emotion. I hadn’t even realized, in getting coats for the children, I was still in socks. No coat or hat. 

It didn’t matter, though. 

When the internal matches the external, the continuity becomes the normal.  

Cold no longer exists. 

I felt something inside of me snap, almost physically. That last straw, I suppose? The straw of finality with a pop of “no more”. 

Raising my head, I looked directly into the sky. Faced the clouds, defied the flakes. Heat rising in my veins, defiance flooded my spirit. Insubordination on every level in which I felt a failure suddenly flashed through my heart electrically and I looked as directly into the face of heaven as mutinously I could and said: 

“I. Am. Done. FINISHED. If my life is going to be hell, it’s going to be on my terms and not at the hands of any husband, any father, any man or any God.” 

I expected lightning to strike me. It did not. There was no thunder. No applause. No affirmation or reproach. I heard no sirens, comprehended no shouting and saw no people as I continued to stare into the white of the sky, my resolve growing, my anger and bitterness swelling. 

I would walk away that day, start my own metaphorical fire and burn much more than sheets and toys. 

Leaving a swath of cauterized life trails, I would finally singe out 15 years and 26 moves later landing in my sister’s attic (THIRD FLOOR!) having incinerated relationships with family, having torched my career, and having smoked out the happy-go-lucky me who once thought life was a beautiful thing. 

According to a sign on the side of the road as one drives from Dover to Milford, DE, four people have died so far this year in home fires.  

Four lost and I have five living. 

Life is a beautiful thing. And it starts with gratitude.  

That I have a landing place is nothing short of a miracle.  

That I have my kids is remarkable. 

I am working on restoring relationships.  

Approaching faith with balance, I am working to restore me. I believe redemption is a thing. 

And the career? Well, that’s obvious. 

Hi, I’m Shane and welcome to my essays.