It's now been a little over 11 months since the fire, so I thought I would try to write about it. Actually, this is my seventh attempt to write about it, so we'll see if I can do it this time. Where to begin... I have no idea.
Everyday, multiple times a day, my attitude toward the event changes. There's really nothing like a fire to put the fear of God in a person. When I think back to the night, standing across the street from our house, watching huge flames fly up from the roof of our house for 4 hours, I think... wow! What would it have been like to see that fall from heaven as a sign of God's wrath? No natural reason for it, no chimney, no accident, just plain unrepentant SIN! I wonder what it would have been like to be a neighboring city of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or even worse, what would it have been like to be IN Sodom and Gomorrah when the Lord rained down burning sulfur on the land (Genesis 19:24). What a dark and heavy place to be! What if God still did this sort of thing? Does He? Are all natural disasters signs of God's wrath? I don't really think so, but they are an incredible display of his power.
I had to write a paper on the sublime once for a Lit class in college and it was incredible to me, how things like fire, the wind, the rain, the size of mountains and the strength of the ocean show the HUGENESS of God and the smallness of us! It's always a little scary to remember how little control we actually have over life. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that we make our own choices. I just think that we overestimate our personal power over, in and throughout circumstances.
It's funny how I feel SO in control of my situations sometimes and how I even get prideful about how well thought out my plans might seem, but truthfully... I AM RIDICULOUS : ) and like I said, there's nothing like a fire to put things in perspective...
When I got the call from my sister it was so weird! I was housesitting and I just stood there for a moment as she told me the details on where to park and meet up with the rest of our family. When I got to our house things only got weirder. I could see the flames from the freeway and it still didn't feel real. I parked about a block away, down the street and walked past 50 or so strangers that somehow knew about my house before I did only to turn the corner and see more fire trucks and fire fighters than I could count. I later found out that there were 52 firefighters and 15 firetrucks!!! Holy moly!In the weeks leading up to this I had been re-decorating my room and that still makes me laugh : ) Long story, but we had 10-12 foot ceilings and I had refused to use a paint roller, so I had painted my room with a medium hand brush over the course of a few all-nighters, which is typically when I do this sort of thing : ) AND I had just bought a HUGE load of purple fabric (10 YARDS) at a hole in the wall place in santa ana with which I made an awesome overflowing curtain. AND I had just finished making a quilt with which I lined the inside of an adorable burnt orange leather luggage tote of my grandma's and had it sitting in the pile of dark purple fabric at the bottom of the curtain : ) AND I had recently bought some new bedding to tie all this together. All this to say... Ecclesiastes 1:2, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" hahaha : )
I loved my room, but it's gone now... along with my grandma's cute leather luggage tote and most of that purple curtain. Fortunately, my current temporary room has a much smaller window and I was able to use the remainder of the curtain and sew pieces together to make a swooping side curtain with buttons to hold the strips together : ) I sound SO Sound of Music right now : ) I'll post pics of the new temporary room soon. I completely revamped it over the course of a few alnighters with a couple buckets of paint, my sewing machine, some modge podge and some maps : ) Maybe I'm still plenty vain even after the fire, but I realized something about myself. It doesn't really matter where I'm living. I just have to make my space my own to feel at home. I will always love fashion and decorating, but I don't think that has to be bad. I do feel slightly bad however that I wasn't too sad about my closet burning... aside from my floral print, pin stripe diesel jeans (a one in a million thrift store find!), because this means I was able to start over... which is kinda exciting : ) I think half my wardrobe is now from Buffalo Exchange : ) THEE most TOTALLY awesome buy, sell, trade thrift store EVER ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Hardly a real thrift store, but still SO cool! And I've decided that my style is some sort of explosion of Anthropoligie's classy-ness, Urban Outfitters' quirky-ness, the Gypsy Den's artsy-ness, an antique store's wear of time and a pinch of Betsy Johnson's girly-ness. I've also come to the conclusion that although I'm not naturally a clean room sorta girl, the effort to do so is fully worth it to me, because I really enjoy coming home to a clean room with a bed that's made, carpet that's visible and walls that scream: THIS IS WHO YOU ARE AND IT'S PERFECT BECAUSE THIS IS YOUR SPACE TO BE YOUUUUUUUUU ! ! ! ! ! When my room's clean, I can think... but I wouln't be able to think if my walls were white and didn't have maps cut in the shape of birds flying across them : ) My head is a crazy tornado of creativity, ideas & chaos, but when I look at my room, I see all my chaos sorted out, but still FUN : ) This has nothing to do with the fire, but it still brings me to where I've come since the fire and the things that have become a priority to me... having a space that is my own and finding God's goodness in everything in and around me : )