House Fire Just Nights Before Christmas

Just nights before Christmas on Dec. 17, 1991 when the newly decorated tree had not only presents beneath but also four little children, all wrapped in blankets, snuggled together for warmth as the fire in the hearth died to embers.

It was the fourth child, our son Matthew, who saved our lives. He was 14 years old at the time.

Unable to contain their childhood excitement of all that surrounds this most wonderful time of year, the three little girls crawled out of their beds upstairs and, dragging dolls behind, thumped-thumped-thumped their way down the wooden staircase to where the tree twinkled by the fire.  Not too thrilled with the prospect of joining them as the only brother — but then faced with the alternative of being left all alone upstairs — Matthew, beloved and bedraggled teddy bear and blanket in hand, found his spot near the tree.

Then tragedy struck.

Sometime, during the very early morning, Matthew woke up coughing. With a bit of asthma, Matthew was having difficulty breathing — exacerbated by something heavy and unidentified hanging in the air. Hearing sounds in the kitchen, and sleep-induced foggily thinking mom must be up baking, Matthew headed toward the sound and pushed open the swinging kitchen door.

The sounds emanating from the kitchen were not the clinking of pots and pans but of pictures — family pictures — melting and crashing to the floor.

The kitchen was on fire.

Suddenly awake from our small son's cry of alarm and sitting up in bed I too now could not breathe. The death-level of smoke already having stealthily, silently, crept down the stairs to settle, lower and lower, upon the unsuspecting family.

Shouting to the wife to gather the children and count noses outside, I returned — foolishly — to fight the flames only to realize quite quickly that the fire's intensity in just the seconds of time for the family to escape was now far beyond the reach of my feeble, flailing blanket. Flames roiled up the wall and across the ceiling with a roar like the sound of a high-speed train when crouching a mere few feet away.

Crawling now on hands and knees across the living room and passing by the door leading upstairs, I heard a cry somewhere up that stairwell — exactly like the heart-wrenching pleading of a little girl.

"How many?" I shouted to my wife from the front door as she and the children huddled close together in the pre-dawn cold.

"Five!" came the answer.  "We're all here!"

I turned and hollered back into the blast furnace that had become our home, "Here kitty kitty!  Please come kitty kitty!"

And she did. The saddest-looking, singed-tail drooping, used-to-be-striped-yellow-but-now-grey-ash-speckled family kitty.

That night, just days before Christmas, we stood together in the darkness, pajamas and teddy bear all that we had. We lost everything. The house that burned is one we rebuilt and where we still live at 14506 Portland Ave. SW in Tillicum. The front-half portion of the house exterior structure was intact but the back half totally destroyed.

The nativity on the hearth would later be found a bit of a shapeless mass. But we had one another.

"We're all here," at Christmas, is an unspeakable joy, a gift of a priceless kind.