Gone

Yah so my best friend's house burned down to the ground the other day.

To. The. Ground.

I watched the footage online today, and in the video, the firepersons are streaming water through a waterhose and into an upper level window, a window formerly known as her living room window. If that is unreal for ME to watch, only imagine how she must have felt, standing on the sidewalk, barefoot, and watching it.

I am immobilized by my desire to mobilize and help. Where do you begin? For God's sake, they ran out of the house WITHOUT SHOES ON and so now they have no shoes. For some reason I keep fixating on the fact that she doesn't have a pen. Or paper. For some reason this strikes me as the essence of having lost everything, when you can't even write down the phone number of the Red Cross because you don't even have a pen and paper to your name.

Thank God she had renter's insurance.

I want to send her clothes out of my closet this instant, but she has no mailing address any more. If I went out there to help I would have no place to stay because HER house is where I stay when I go to that town.

Me? I'm fine. I'm finer than frog's hair. You can read about it here. Meantime, I'll be sitting here, immobilized, having my mind utterly boggled by the idea of losing all your possessions in an hour.