A Fire and Fear

I just finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird earlier, and I was thinking about a scene where one of the neighbors' houses caught on fire. The little girl Jean Louise and her brother stood down the street watching, afraid of the flames and what might become of their own house if the wind shifted in the wrong direction. Jean was anxious and kept asking her brother whether or not they should start moving their belongings out of their own house to safety. He put his arm around her to keep her warm and reassure her, and he said, "it ain't time to worry yet. I'll let you know when."

It reminded me of the time when I was a little girl and we had a chimney fire in the stove in our kitchen. We were all quickly rushed outside in our pajamas and robes, clutching our stuffed animals with blankets draped over our shoulders.

The fire trucks came, and with it a flurry of activity. The ladders came out and the firemen donned their gear, connected the hose to the tanker truck. My father had been the chief of the volunteer fire department for years, so this was not all together a new experience for me. I knew the other firemen, had even ridden in parades on the very trucks now parked in my yard.

But this was so different. I had always loved to watch the flames dance, as a moth is drawn to light. But these flames threatened something else, something sacred to me - my home. I never even saw the them, yet they scared me more than any other thing ever had.

It was not my toys or any of our things I worried about - not people or pets. We were all safe, sitting helplessly in the driveway cloaked in a pervasive fear that chilled us to our marrow. I was afraid for my home - I do not mean our house, the inanimate object made of wood. I mean home, the word that so often defines our sense of self and comfort, our place of being, and belonging. We could always move elsewhere, to build a new life. But it could never be the same, the very newness of it the reason.

I would miss the pencil marks on the door jamb where my mother had measured us over the years, the spot on the wall where the dog had worn the pattern off the wall paper by lying up against it every time he came inside. I would miss playing clubhouse in the cubbyhole under the eaves with my best friend Sarah.

I think in some small way it was then that fear began to creep into my life - not an all-controlling fear, and certainly not incapacitating. A fear ever present in my sub-conscious that made me begin to see the what-ifs in life, to somehow overthink the possibilities of what could happen, what could go wrong.

I remembered that fear today as I read and identified with Jean Louise. It seems like such a distant memory now, the fire and the fear. I am still sometimes afraid (even when I have no just cause), but I am slowly learning to let go. We all need someone to tell us, "it ain't time to worry yet. I'll tell you when."