11. Reverse Panic Attack😥
Three days after we evacuated and we were home again, sleeping in our beds and back in the routine of feeding animals and trying to have as normal a life apres-flames, I found out the true story of why our singed house didn’t keep burning. I was standing in the main street talking to one of youngest daughter’s friends who has lost everything when her house went up(down?) in less than 20 minutes. I was lamenting the fact that it wasn’t quite the summer holidays that we all expected when she said “At least I get out of cleaning up my room!” We stared at each other in shock, in delight, in the sheer wickedness of voicing something we truly felt, then doubled over in helpless hysterical laughter. Wiping our eyes, I feel an arm slung around my shoulders by the tiny, wiry seventy old woman who used to be the town’s post mistress. She tells me how a neighbour patrolling the next street saw smoke billowing from our back veranda and yelled at her to get over there. She and the former occupant of our house doused two fires that had taken hold either side of our back door and were up in the roof. I go from laughing to gasping for air in an instant. My heart feels like it is going to explode, I can’t breath, I can’t stand, my mind is a black hole and yet I am reaching my hand out to the young girl, our eyes still locked, and telling her I’m okay, she will be okay but we all know that is a lie.