SPEAK
CHILLING OUT
When my house burned down while I was hiking on a glacier, it changed my outlook and cooled my perfectionism.
The day my childhood hours burned was the first time in my life that flick list I was 12 years old hitting pittsburgh, and I had just graduated from the only university I ever felt like a job had been built out from under me. I was an obsessive-compulsive kid who worried about everything from the germs in the swimming pool to the angle of the pillows on the futon in my mom's family room. The prospect of attending school took an action role in making decisions for my life, was a little frightening.
My mom and my stepad are realists. Late July marks the end of the busy real estate season in Los Angeles, a trip to Alaska that summer.
A trip to the Last Frontier would earn me lots of bragging rights back in school so I was excited. As we waited to board the plane, my mom made me try to use the restroom one last time. After washing my hands so long that I needed Vaseline to handle my chapped hands and getting yelled at
by my stepped for making us almost miss our flight, we headed on board one of the planes to Anchorage to would take us to Anchorage.
We traveled through Alaska in a small motor home. One day after hiking on a glacier and exploring a copper mine in McCarthy Alaska, we called Mike to check on how much he was on check on everything back in Lawrence. The pay phone was literally a foot away from the
banks of a rushing glacier river When Omaa found out who was on the phone, she started crying so loudly I could hear it a couple of feet away, over the rush of the river. She told us that our house had burned down two days before.
I began to cry I thought about my dog, Kay Lee. first, but when he found out she had been safe outside in her pen, I quickly moved on to my own belongings; my yellow-wallpapered room, my more than 30 stuffed animals, my Beanie baby tent did got from my day only three weeks before I moved to my bedroom clothes. I had lost everything I knew, and now we would probably have to go straight to the airport to fly home to sort things out, losing the last week of our vacation
Later that evening, we walked to the only restaurant in McCarthy a pizza parlor and ate dinner. To my relief my parents came with me and the rest of our vacation before facing the task ahead. They
Near McCarthy, Alaska, Anne Weltner fits for a photo with her mother, Patty McGrew. She and Casey Vangemen.
saw no reason to rush home because the house had already burned.
We got back from the Kansas City airport after dark, so we waited until the next morning to go see the house. I don't want to look at it until our kitchen that where the fire had mysteriously started — it
was electrical, but the cause was never identified — no hard floor. All of the walls were chared, my beautiful yellow wallpaper was brown, and there was a huge hole in the wall, through which the tile is in
All of mv
clothes were out of my closet because Oma had tried to get the smoke stains, water damage and smoke out of them so I'd have something to wear on my first days of school in mid-August, but he was unsuccessful. The rest of our furniture was there, and Katy got her hair cut out back. I have rarely smelled anything like the smoky, chemical smell of that house.
by Anne Weltmer
The fire, smoke and water so badly damaged our house that we salvaged only things in the room — like the pictures that had been fused to their frames. We kept the bad warped and melted kitchen phone as a reminder it sat on top of our television for 12 years.
not to rebuild, so we sold the house to a builder and bought a new lot.
We stayed with Oma for the first week of school before we moved into a significantly smaller house. until we could build our new
house, which we moved into the next summer. I were hiking both a skiff skim on my back and out of a suitcase for three weeks out of a suitcase for three weeks.
I got a new wardrobe, matching furniture and a bedding set for the start of my junior high year. I remember my mother's anxiety about sorting through everything to be salvaged. However, I moved on quickly because I was
Anne Weltner's childhood house as it burned from the inside out. If neighbors hadn't seen the fire when they did, the house would have exploded. Now she has spread to nearby houses.
happy with all of my new thing,
and I made new friends and got involved in school. Within a year
about the almost entirely
I realized I could live without everything I'd had since I was a kid because I cared less about being clean and organized and stopped being so picky. I became less attached to material items and to houses especially, and now have lived in my life for 51 years. It's exciting to experience a new place to live.
Although I still straighten the pillows on the couch sometimes, I learned early and quickly to be more flexible. Looking back, I was lucky to lose my house because I gained perspective on the importance of material items. I remembered how that of our fires grazes my mind probably less than once a year. I would have been a different person without it.
02. 15.2007 JAYPLAY <19