A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.

Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.

But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.

You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:

It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”

My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.

Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.

[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]