As much as our lives are finding some routine and some normalcy, there are many things that may never be the same for us. Because the cause of our house fire has been reported as “undetermined”, it’s hard for us to not speculate on the dozens of different scenarios that could have started the fire. I’m hopeful that with some time, we’ll react better in certain situations, but for now, we find that seemingly normal, everyday things are affected by our house-fire experience. For example:

  • Fire cliches. Listen closely to day-to-day conversations. We “burn” and “fire” a lot in our daily speech. I recently had a client cut short a meeting because he had to go “put out some fires.” Someone told Annika she could “burn all her Badger t-shirts now that she’s a Gopher.” I feel the pit in my stomach grow when I hear these fire references. Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 10.49.58 AM
  • Power outage. Last weekend, a band of strong thunderstorms rolled through Stillwater. After the storm went through, we all headed to bed about 10 p.m. As we were settling in, the electricity in the house flickered on and off a few times. It finally went off. Then back on. Then off again. It stayed off at this time. Because there was no active storm in the area, we immediately thought there was an electrical problem in the house. Which means, we were all nervous there could be a fire. It turned out to be a widespread, storm-related outage.
  • Mowing the lawn. I recently spent a few hours mowing our lawn at the burnt house.  Outside of the fact that it smells and looks horrible there, it was still nice to be out on our land. When I was finished, I left the tractor outside because I was nervous to put it in the barn, afraid the hot engine could ignite something.
  • Gas fireplace. You would have thought that because our rental house has a gas, not wood, fireplace we’d feel safe. On the contrary, the eternal flame of the pilot light is actually quite disconcerting to all of us.

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    Flameless candles hold so much more appeal for me now than they did just one month ago. At this point in our life, any flame is a bad flame.

  • Fire pits. Hanna was out to eat at a restaurant recently and a little girl went running through the restaurant yelling “fire! fire!” Hanna got really nervous but quickly realized the girl was running to sit by the outside fireplace.

So if you’re ever with any of us, please be patient with any obsessive-compulsive behavior that might be tied to pyrophobia. We’re working through it, but we’ve had our fill of fire for a while.