Finding Blessings (and some laughs) through Hardship

I existed in a daze the first 24 or so hours after thefire.  Tammy-Lee wouldn’t leave meunattended with the children because I did not respond to them at all.  I sat staring straight ahead, barely answeringquestions directed at me.  I guess I wasin shock.  I remember something Marrissasaid that kinda shook me out of it a little. The night or two before the fire, I had under-cooked supper, and thenproceeded to burn it the next evening, or something along those lines.  But we were sitting at Tammy-Lee’s table andMarrissa says to me, “Well, Mom, that supper is well cooked now!  It’s burnt!” And she just giggled.  She keptthe joke up all day, whenever we talked about food.

We were putting any extra money away to finish the roof andmove the kitchen from the basement to the main floor.  Our spring season was going to be busy withthese renovations.  Jason was sitting,watching the house burn that night and he texts me, “I guess we can returnthose shingles now.”  I texted back,“Uhm, the receipt for those shingles is in the house; it might be hard toreturn them.”  Maybe we’ll be able tosell them, I guess.

I no longer have a leaky roof, or I guess you could say Ihave a REALLY leaky roof right now.

I don’t have to declutter all the “stuff” that was in thathouse.

We get to design (or help design) our new home rather thantrying to make this one work for what we wanted.  And through that process, we hope to supportthe local economy by hiring local companies to do the work.

Oh, another funny:  AsI left the house with my troop of 7 (my six and one of their friends), I was onthe phone with 911.  When I finally wasout of range, I dropped the phone, thinking to myself that I didn’t need it anylonger.  I was carrying the two youngestand herding the others as best as possible, I didn’t need something else in myhand!  Well, little Marrissa saw thephone and scooped it up as she followed me down the laneway.  We plan to put it in a shadow box as a memory.