Storytelling Thursdays

The 4Generation House (Part Six)

My computer files are filled with the stories I have written. Some are true, some are not. Some made it into books, some did not. Some are still in my head waiting to be written. Hopefully, having a story in your inbox on Thursdays will brighten your weeks as winter trudges toward spring. I will also recommend some books I have loved!

The 4Generation House (2011-2013)

This is the final post of the story that was part of a manuscript written before I began my therapy journey in 2014. It was never published but sections were included in two chapters of A Brave Life: Survival, Resilience, Faith and Hope after Childhood Trauma. Many of our most treasured—and stressful—memories occurred during those three years. I am grateful that I paused to collect the stories.

The thing about family disasters is that you never have to wait long
before the next one puts the previous one into perspective.
—Robert Brault—

The Places I Have Fallen

Falling at the garage sale was one of my three falls while living in The 4Generation House. Falling and I have had a longterm relationship. A good friend of mine suffers from the same malady. Our brains do not communicate very well with our feet when we walk. We have fallen into and under trash bins; down and up stairways and hills; across and o􏰅 stages; in and out of doors; and over and out of chairs. It is remarkable neither one of us ever broke a bone as a result of our many calamities.

The second fall followed ill-chosen words. Melinda called me to ask for an address, so she could send a thank-you card. Both surprised and impressed, instead of giving her praise for sending the card, I responded with, “I better watch my walking today, because the earth just shifted on its axis, and I don’t want to fall.”

No more than a half hour later, I ate my words face first on my dad’s bedroom floor. There should have been a video of this exquisite fall. Setting his keifer and pills down on a tray, I walked to the window to open the blinds, turned to pick up the tray, and fell over an extension cord (one I had several times made a mental note to move). On the way down, my hand hit the tray sending keifer and pills all over the floor, furniture, and walls.

Enter puppy.

The desperate attempts to keep the puppy from eating the pills and licking the keifer off the walls were awe inspiring. My dad watched in dismay.

When is an accident truly an accident? Not when one has disregarded a potential problem for weeks. Lesson learned.

But the third fall qualified as a true accident.

Scott and I were walking laps around the block after working out. On our final lap, my foot caught on the edge of a landscape border (another landscape border injury). The fall continued in slow motion until my arm and knee went down in the rocks and my head slammed onto the driveway ... while Scott watched helplessly.

Up to this point, my falls had resulted in plenty of minor injuries, but nothing ever broke. A trip to the ER the following day confirmed my luck had run out—my elbow was broken. The bone fragment didn’t move, so I thankfully avoided surgery.

This happened on the first day of my summer break and, just to add to the chaos, the puppy thought my cast looked like a gigantic chew toy waving in the air.

We Saw Fire and We Saw Rain

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.
—James Taylor—

The fall that broke my elbow occurred shortly before my sixtieth birthday. The muscles and tendons injured in the fall were significantly more painful than the elbow itself and saying my arm broke sounded like a more accurate description. Everything became increasingly difficult. It was the beginning of our second summer in the house, and we had great plans—but few came to fruition.

What a relief to be able to remove my half cast to type (and shower) as my arm healed. Before breaking my arm, I had dismantled my office for a redo. Now trying to put it back together—and work in the middle of the mess, with a broken arm—proved challenging.

Then Melinda began to suffer from severe headaches, eventually resulting in two ER visits. One afternoon while Aria napped, I decided to go to work for a few hours. With so little time to work, the office conversations about a fire didn’t register. Then my cell phone rang.

“Janyne, are you watching the news? The fire is close to your house.”

Our house sat out on the plains stretching east from the city. There weren’t mountains near the house. I expressed my confusion, and my friend said, “No, it’s in Black Forest.” My heart sank; I packed up to head home.

While driving down the highway toward home, I could see smoke billowing over our neighborhood. The beautiful forest about two miles from our home was on fire. I listened to the radio, and took pictures at every stop. My mind could not comprehend the enormity of the fire. Just beyond where I turned toward our house, police cars were blocking the road that continued north.

The fire was marching in our direction and the pre-evacuation line enveloped our neighborhood. The chaos of the evacuation from the Waldo Canyon fire the year before was a stark reminder that we had one bedridden daughter, two small children, one elderly man, a cat, a puppy, and a woman with a broken elbow. This left one able-bodied man in the house. The odds were against us should the fire require us to evacuate.

How close the fire came to our house marked with a *

We took the children to a safe place and our neighbor drove Melinda to the hospital. Scott and I began preparing for evacuation and spent an anxious night before the wind changed direction and turned the fire back on itself. When we knew we were safe, we fell into bed in an exhausted stupor. So many homes burned, and lives disrupted!—a sad day for many.

And then the rain came—the worst thing possible after the fires. But we needed rain—desperately. If the rain had come first, the fire wouldn’t have had free reign on the forest. Now rain fell for days, then weeks.

The stories from the summer of fire and rain could fill an entire book; but for now, between the broken elbow, illness, and the fire, we were pretty much done with summer. The following year would be our final year in The 4Generation House.

(Reprinted from A Brave Life: Survival, Resilience, Faith and Hope after Childhood Trauma)

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Resources:

I usually share one of my favorite children's books that connects to the story. As I read through the story of the fire all the emotions of that night returned. We did our best to protect and care for the two small children in our home but did not yet have an understanding of the experience being a traumatic event that might continue to impact them. When the fire was contained and our family and home were safe, it was easy to move on and assume the children were not still being impacted. The following resource, created by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network is filled with wisdom I wish I had access to when the fire threatened our home.

Trinka and Sam and the Big Fire