Today the first things for the new house arrived. We have gotten clothes and kitchen things and even desks and a bed. Those are different about the thing things that arrived today is that you actually attach them to the physical structure of the house. Today we got curtains.

I found the curtains on sale online for 7080% off so just made a commitment for all the rooms. They are not the curtains of my dreams, I don’t think but having them will make the home feel less empty of what used to  as we are establishing connections to a new version of our home there.

We are trying to do some nice things for the house so we are pushing and pulling the budget. “You get the $98 toilet, Living Level Bathroom, since you won’t get used all that much.” My bathroom will be a siren song. She will have both shower and a small soaker tub. Passing by will make you want to stop and focus on the luxuries of hygiene.

In fact, being able to take a shower or fill up a bath tub is uniquely an assumption among the well resourced in the world. Even those of use who have plenty and more in our area think about how we use water. After the wildfire this summer I find that I think about water a lot. I don’t horde it but it has changed in meaning.

When we were evacuating we had 45 minutes based on the times of the phone calls on my cell phones. That was a luxurious amount of time compared to some. The reason we had so much was because when I saw the start of the fire I said, “Get your medicine, we are evacuating.” The official evacuation did not come for another 20 or more minutes.

After I saw the fire and declared we were evacuating, we packed essentials like some clothes, marriage license, passports and hard drives along with one computer. We went off to check the neighbors. Then someone from the Sheriff’s office came by and said they recommended evacuation. About 10 minutes later they said we had to evacuate. About 10 minutes after that they were starting to break into people homes to check to see if anyone was left. As the cars in our neighborhood filed out I was counting. Each neighbor went by, we pulled out and I saw the remaining neighbor closing the car doors getting ready to fall in with the rest of us. What I did not know then was that his house was already on fire. Ours exploded a few minutes later but we did not know for a couple of days since it was an active fire zone. Water to fight the fire would not have mattered. There was water, in fact since some of the regular water tankers just happened to be in the area. The big fires like ours are fought with air drops of fire retardant and shovels and track hoes and bobcats wielded bu people digging firebreaks.

Water would have mattered, mattered enough to have prevented the fire, had it arrived in any normal pattern during the winter. We had o much less snow it was dangerous just to be outside even before the fire since the particulate matter was frighteningly high as farmers tried to plow to plant. For days before the fire I went out to my gardens worrying about my plants and wondering what this odd feeling was in the air. I actually watered my plants in the middle of the day several days. The sun took all of the moisture away. Everything was dying. All of us held our breath and this year what we worried about teach year happened.

As we were leaving I decided to rush to the kitchen and get food and water. Who knew where we wold end up. I took a burlap shopping bag from a grocery store in Scotland, opened the refrigerator and with the sweep of my arm just dumped everything into the bag. I did not bother to get meat, could not eat that if you were camping out in a shelter somewhere.

When I came to the bottles, I grabbed water bottles that were more than 20 years old. We did not know about BPA then and I a sure they are “infected” It was water, I had it in the cabinets for emergency use and it was fulfilling its mission.

The water is still in those bottles. They are carefully tucked into a drawer here in the temporary house. I drank a bit of the water the first few days after the fire and then decided not to do that since it was the only water we had from the old house. In fact, it as one of the few things we had from our old house.

When we drill holes into the walls to hang the curtains in the new house I think we shall toast them with some of our water and give thanks that no one died or was hurt in our fire.