They are just THINGS.

Just a dryer full of THINGS that caught fire at the laundromat last night.

It shouldn’t be such a big deal, I keep telling myself.

During the actual fire and the immediate aftermath, I was more mad than anything. What the heck kind of dryer catches wet clothes on fire? MY stuff! Expensive stuff! GAAAH!

So while we’re waiting for the fire department to show up, my four new friends in the laundromat and I realize a few things:

• The fire extinguisher does not work. All this time in my life I’ve wanted to try a fire extinguisher, and I get the one that’s been rotting for over 5 years.
• No one has a solid bottomed container to carry water from the laundry sink. We just have baskets. The utility closets are locked and there are no employees on duty. Not even an emergency number for a manager.

But the fire is not letting up and since the dryer where it started is attached to a whole wall of other dryers, we all figure we have to do something. Several of us dump drinks down the sink and one guy ferries the 20 oz. water bottles back and forth, fizzling the flames bit by bit. One girl empties the last of her detergent and uses the jug to douse some more flames with sudsy water.

By the time the fire department arrives, we think we have most of the flames out, but they give everything a good hosing anyway, just in case. The fire had been burning UNDER the dryer and had either gotten into or come from the electrical system, so it turns out it could have gone out of control at any minute. Goodness, says one nice fireman, didn’t you have a fire extinguisher?

I show him.

He writes down the number of the fire marshal for me, and urges me to file a complaint first thing on Monday. Major OSHA violations, big time fines, you all could have been exploded, big splort, etc.

We haul the burnt stuff out the front door to let it smolder in the snow. It was my duvet cover – my gorgeous, too-expensive duvet cover (which was entirely machine washable and dryable, natch). And my towels, my splurge-money fluffy towels with matching bathmat.

Things. A $350 load of laundry, but just things.

Until I pick away at the burnt heap in the snow, and then it ceases to be just “things.”

My favorite t-shirt. My all-time-awesome, bury-me-in-it, super mostest favorite t-shirt. 50/50, long-sleeved, white. On the front, the logo: 2000-2001 Writing Center Staff, Truman State University. And on the back, in black letters in Times New Roman, just this:

word.

That was my writing shirt.

And then I cried a little.

I have been pretty much obsessing about fires for the last 12 hours now. I cried over a t-shirt. I am pissed about three baskets’ worth of smoky laundry that I have to wash again before I leave on vacation tomorrow. I relived the other fires, the funny and the not-funny-at-all, in my head.

And while I fume and plot how I will recoup my $350, I am really just wondering, over and over, how people pull themselves together when they lose everything they have.

How can that work? How can they do it?

I can’t even begin to fathom. I’m shaken up by THIS? And people have to deal with THAT?

Memories are almost inextricably intertwined with the things we gather over the course of our lives. I wish my brain were spongy enough to absorb everything that’s ever happened to me so I didn’t need this picture of my old cat who died, or this rock from the peak of highest mountain I ever climbed, or this photo of me with my baby niece. I can still be me without those things and I can still remember all of those times, but the THINGS are a nice prompt. You can see them and smile because they can automatically remind you of something good.

Like my shirt. It said I was a writer. It might have been the only thing that made me smile when I put it on. Every. single. time.

This is why I’ll never be Zen. Things, things, things.