Fires

I draw in a breath and stare at the photo. I’m as attracted to what I see as the first time I found it. Our house. Tucked away behind guardian pines, survivors of one of the worst fires to ever hit northern Arizona’s Mogollon Rim country, our modest little place looks like the retreat it is, painted this time with freshly fallen snow. Idyllic. Serene. Inviting. I can’t stop the tears.

This is one more in a series of terrible, difficult things I am left to handle on my own now. Selling our house in the mountains. We already have an amazing offer and it hasn’t even hit MLS. It’ll be gone before I can blink, exactly like everything else I’ve lost in the last month. I hope there’s something amazing God has planned for me, Romans 8:28 style, because right now I feel like I’ve been abandoned by Him.

Crushed by loss, I told my counselor two weeks ago about my decision to sell our new home in Heber. I can’t live there without you, Babe. It’s too full of brief memories, the last of which are painful reminders of how it all ended. It wouldn’t have mattered where we lived when the virus destroyed our story. I’m not the kind of woman who is comforted by empty rooms with loud memories of the loved ones who don’t live there anymore. I’d have sold that pain and moved on even if we had still lived here in the Valley. I’ve done it before. It’s just that it still hurts no matter what I decide to do.

“Leave a mark somewhere on your property,” my counselor advised. “Something that will continue on long after you and Rob have left there.” She suggested carving our initials in one of the pine trees on our land. Our land. We’ve never had land before, and I probably never will again. Oh, how my heart aches for you.

I welcomed her idea and, since I was headed back to the house for the first time since ambulances drove us away in mid-January, I knew going back would be painful. Taking her advice gave me a purpose not wrapped up in packing boxes. I decided to pick a tree and commemorate our love story there. You’re the wood carver, Baby, not me, but I found one of your fire department knives in a dresser drawer as I cleaned out our room that weekend and tucked it in my pocket. The pines were going to be challenging. They’re so thick with protective bark, I wondered if I’d need a chainsaw to cut through with our initials. Katy wondered the same thing.

We met up in the backyard Sunday afternoon after all the friends who helped me pack up our belongings had left. “Mama, I found your tree,” Katy told me, and we held each other and cried, standing in the yard you and I had fenced for our wanderlust dog, knowing he’d never run free there again.

She had found it. The one tree out of the dozens on our land. Right off the deck. At eye level, there was a dinner plate size exposure where its thick bark had mysteriously disappeared, leaving a smooth place where I could use my amateur skills to carve. It was perfect. It was difficult. It was bittersweet.

Katy disappeared into the house and I stood at that tree, sobbing, carving, trying not to cut off my fingers as I pressed the blade as deeply as I could into the scarred pine. Adding more pain to a survivor of a terrible fire, I commiserated with the tree as I branded it with the only thing I could think of to remind people that you and I once lived here, once dreamed together, and once took a final risk, here, on this spot. R Heart E, I scratched in the golden smoothness of the exposed wood. Rough. Oddly artistic. But I couldn’t make it cut as deeply as I knew it needed to go if it would stand the test of time and not disappear the way our dream had.

Katy’s husband, Dan, appeared beside me. “Want me to get a Dremel tool out of the garage and make it deeper?” he offered. I stood back and watched while he leaned into the tree, impressing the tattoo I’d scratched out deep into the tall Ponderosa Pine. When he was finished, he snapped a picture and sent it to my phone.

That’s when I saw what I’d never noticed while I stood there alone, crying, and adding even more damage to a once ravaged pine. Surrounding the clear initials and the heart shape I’d left as a memorial to our brief presence here were burn marks. And encompassing the new image like a frame was heavy bark as black as coal, evidence of the Rodeo-Chedeski fire. Nearly twenty years ago, that 468,000-acre monster jumped the road in our canyon and swept through the empty acreage north of our house, leaving our trees wounded but the house intact.

Like me.

I have to try to believe that now.

If God is the Author of my story, of your story, of our story, then this tree had a story for me. Of terrible fire. Of survival against unbelievable odds. Of life on the other side of destruction. And of memories that will someday comfort and remind me and those who know us that we loved each other deeply and always will.

I left a picture of our love on a scarred pine tree at our dream house in Heber, Arizona, darling. I think the tree had more of a message for me than I realized when I used it to leave a memorial for others to see.

I’ve been through fire, too. I’m forever scarred by the nightmare. But I’m still here. I don’t know why, but here I am. And I will always love you and remember you and thank God that you and I belonged to each other. You are still my beloved.

R Heart E

 

“You've walked me through fires
Pulled me from flames
If You're in this with me
I won't be afraid
When the smoke billows higher, oh and higher
And it feels like I can barely breathe
I'll walk through thesе fires
'Cause You're walking with mе.”

~ Fires, recorded by Jordan St. Cyr on the album, Be My Defender