It was autumn and coming on Thanksgiving. I don’t remember why, but we had to move from our house on the bluff overlooking Camano Island on the Puget Sound.

I loved that house. It was an old two-story, faded red from being buffeted by many storms. It sat on a bluff, two hundred feet above the water’s edge. Along the front was a wide covered porch. I’ll never forget the day, when during a tremendous storm, a bolt of lightning came down and struck the porch. A burned hole in the wood bore witness.

Once, one of our steers decided it would go down the path to the water’s edge, but then couldn’t come back up alone. Our two steers were always breaching the pasture’s fences, seemingly looking for greener pastures. We tried to coax it up the path, but were unsuccessful. We finally resorted to tying our horse, Coquill, to a rope around the steer’s neck, to drag it up the steep path. The steer was panicked, its eyes bulging almost out of its head as it bellowed its protest. The steer wouldn’t stand, so Coquill dragged that dead weight all the way back to its pasture.

The floors of the house were made of wood, soft fir boards, also faded from many years of use. Even the walls were made of wood. The stairs to the second floor creaked and groaned, as if it was an old man with painful joints.

The conjoined living room and dining area had windows that stretched completely across the front of the house. This is where we could sit on the window bench and watch orcas surfacing out on the water, surrounding small fishing boats. It was lovely, just lovely.

I kept a vegetable garden. The drive was long and on one side were long barns for chickens and other animals. Altogether, we had two horses, two steers, a bunch of chickens, and our wonderful dog, Skokie. When we were asked to leave this house, we were forced to sell the horses, we killed the steers and the chickens, and searched for a new home. We were sad.

Then, as I said in the beginning, right before Thanksgiving, we found an old, almost but not actually, dilapidated house on low-lying ground. It was much smaller than the house on the bluff, and I didn’t have the wonderful views of the Sound or room for animals.

If my memory serves me, it was probably 1975–76. Jesse was still sleeping in a crib. We were planning on having company for Thanksgiving and I’m sure my mom was going to come up to the Island for the holidays. I had just purchased some warm yellow Chantal pottery for the occasion.On the weekend, I was getting everything unpacked and put away. Jack was napping on the couch, Jesse was napping in his crib, and Hannah was puttering around. I needed to get to the store to prepare for the week coming up and to come up with something for dinner. I wanted Jack to come along. He suggested that he and Jesse stay home and continue their naps, but I convinced him to come with me. So we woke Jesse, and we all took off in Jack’s truck.

On the Island, unless you lived right in one of the tiny villages, everything was some distance away from everything else. There was no reason to hurry. And so we meandered on the back roads, enjoying the fall colors, until we reached Sebo’s, which was the only large grocery store nearby.We drove home slowly, enjoying the fall colors.

As we approached our house, we saw smoke and lots of cars and trucks in our driveway and on the road in front of the house. The house was fully engulfed in flames. All of the vehicles, we found out, were those of the volunteer fire department.We sat in the truck for a moment, stunned. We couldn’t move.

From there my memory is faulty. I saw some of our furniture out in front of the house. And then I couldn’t see anything more. We were told that we couldn’t come up to the house or go into the house, and we would need to find some place to go. I don’t remember where we went. Thank goodness, Skokie had either gone with us or had been outside because we still had him with us.

I know that Jack would remember fine details about our lives after the fire. But I know that we stayed with others, from house to house, until we found another place to live. We had very little left.

We weren’t allowed back into our house until after three days, I believe. When it was certain that the fire was completely out and there weren’t any smoldering coals, we went back to see what we could see. We had our antique iron bed frames, we had a carved wooden commode that the firemen had thrown out onto the lawn, and our sofa, also thrown out onto the lawn. Thieves had gone into the outside shed and stolen Jack’s tools for his trade as a stone mason and for gardening.

The new yellow dishes were chopped into bits as the firemen fought the fires in the walls and the cupboards in the kitchen. The handheld receiver of the phone on the wall had melted so that it almost reached the ground. I owned a lot of Tupperware, and it had melted like a plastic waterfall, except for the colors that, of course, I recognized.Our clothes were either burned or smoke-damaged to such a degree that they just fell into dust. There was nothing left of bed or bathroom linens. There were some books that were salvageable, having been pressed tightly together on their shelves, but they were smoke-damaged and mostly not worth keeping. We salvaged a few.

We often take for granted all the things that we need in our daily lives, like toothbrushes, safety pins, barrettes, hairbrushes, not to mention big things like dishes, silverware, pots and pans, and thousands of other things big and small. After some 7 years of accumulating everything one would need for a home, we had none of these.

We didn’t yet have renters insurance, and so we had no recourse to replace any of these items except the generosity of well-wishers. Mostly people donated clothes, which were, I would say, generally not useful to us except in the short term. Of course, we had a certain style, an aesthetic that everyone develops over the course of their lives, and to wear others’ hand-me-downs was difficult, even humiliating.

Besides wearing others’ castaways, we didn’t even have a home of our own, if I remember right, for at least a couple of months. Please forgive me if I don’t sound grateful because I certainly was, but I had never had to rely on other people’s charity up until this time in my life.

Eventually, we found another home to rent, which was better than the last. It was determined that the fire had started in faulty wiring in the kitchen. I often think what would have happened if Jack and Jesse hadn’t woken up from their naps to go with me to the store. The fire department reported that the fire burned slow and hot, and they might have died of smoke inhalation before they even realized there was a fire. It took a long time for the fire to break through the roof and for the fire department to be called.

You’d think that probably we would have been depressed or negatively affected. This was traumatic, losing everything that we had built, but we just began to rebuild. Jack was back working almost immediately, and I continued as a stay-at-home mom, happily cooking, cleaning, and raising the children on that beautiful Island.