the fire

I've waited a couple weeks to write this blog because I'm still pretty emotional about it. But here is the story...

On April 15th my parents house in Spokane had a huge fire. As you know, my parents moved to Cody, WY in February, but they just happened to be home this particular week to pack up everything in their house and move (they originally left everything in Spokane because they were renting a furnished house in Cody and didn't want to put everything in storage). At about 3am my Dad was woken up by the sound of chirping. He thought something might have happened to the water heater so he went downstairs to the laundry room to check it out. The water heater was fine, but then some flicking orange light caught his eye from down the hall and he ran down to find a few boxes in the living room on fire. Most of their belongings had been packed by their moving company and boxes were just stacked in the living room waiting to be loaded. My dad was able to get he and my Mom out of the house and called 911, but the living room ended up being a total loss...couches, TV, piano, art, family albums, etc were completely burned.

They are still waiting on the fire report which will list a cause, but they have a great insurance company and reclamations company that will fix everything and clean and restore what they can. You never think anything like this can ever happen to your family, but thankfully no one was hurt. It still feels pretty unreal to me, but this weekend Eric and I will be in Spokane so we're planning to drive by the house and see if we can walk through it.

My parents took these pictures after the fire department had already cleared out most of the burned debris from the family room (that's all the stuff you see on their front and side lawn).