IRREPLACEABLE THINGS
SUSAN RUANE MCCONNELL

Long after the Waldo Canyon fire jumped a ridge and rolled down the foothills and into my Colorado Springs neighborhood in 2012, instantly incinerating my home and 145 of my immediate neighbors’ homes—essentially, most of my entire community—the all-consuming grief and loss and being lost have subsided. In their stead is a quieter, slower-to-surface ache. It shows up when I reach into a drawer to retrieve an item of clothing I no longer have. Or I begin preparing a recipe in the kitchen and realize all over again I’ve yet to replace the stick blender essential to one of the steps. Or a tune on the radio summons the memory of The Flying W Wranglers, whose songs drifted across the nearby ranch to my front porch on summer evenings, year in and year out.

Some days, all this time later, I walk into the house where I now live, far from the foothills and swooshing breezes, and experience a surreal disorientation. I take in the different furnishings, different colors, different floor plan, different light. All these things combine, more or less, in a pleasing way and yet my reaction is unsettling, visceral. How the hell did I get here?

I could tell you my now not-so-unique story, reiterating what it was like to stand before a smoking pit that once was my house and see into an unending vista of charred and broken landscape, seeing where and what I shouldn’t have been able to see, feeling I’d landed on some grotesque, uninhabitable planet that sucked all breath from my lungs and emptied a monsoon from my eyes.

I might speak of the following sleepless weeks, and the months and months of maniacal obsession to complete an insurance claim that would only cover fifty-four percent of my actual loss, and the panic that set in when the first snow came the next winter and I had no boots. Or shovel. Or hat. Or mittens.

Starting from scratch after a total loss is a process with a defined beginning and no discernible ending; it is a journey without map or schedule. I continue to discover that it simply takes as long as it takes… and mine’s still taking.

The fire took my home from me, and every little and big thing in it. With all good intentions, people will (and did and do still) utter a variety of well-intended platitudes to cast a positive spin. You’re lucky—you’ll get a whole new wardrobe. You get to buy all new furniture. At least you’re alive. But the one that surely arrives as fingernails across chalkboard: things can be replaced.

If only that were perfectly, unequivocally, matter-of-factly true. But it’s not.

Consider the story of my little chest of drawers, and other first things that launched me into and carried me through my grown-up life.

I first met up with the chest in 1976, after it was pulled from the dank, cobwebby basement at one of my grandmothers’ houses. It was unremarkable, nothing special to look at—the wood was dry and cracked in places and the drawers had lost all glide—but it came from someone I loved, whose artistic soul and homemaking panache I admired. Someone who loved me, quietly but with aplomb, who wanted to contribute to my start in the adult world. I also needed what the chest had to offer. In the ensuing decades, I would transform it several times over into many kinds of special.

I was then a full-time sophomore in college with an almost full-time job to pay for the tuition as well as a lifestyle outside of a dormitory. I’d rented my first solo apartment—a one bedroom, corner unit on Dale Street in the aging St. Louis suburb of Richmond Heights.

My unit was one of eight in an unadorned, squat brick building that more resembled a prison than residence. Nonetheless, the apartment felt grand with its voluminous kitchen; its tidy, black and white tiled bath and porcelain pedestal sink; a decent-sized living room; and a small bedroom with the thinnest excuse for a closet. Hardwood floors ran throughout, and the wood entry door with frosted glass panes glanced across the hall landing to a twin.

Every room had glass to bring in light: a window above the tub; four in the living room; three in the bedroom; and one in the kitchen. The windowed back door afforded even more light and an expanded view to a slice of a metal-railed cement patio, tucked under a set of fire escape stairs.

Almost directly across the street sat an auto repair shop—and beefy, black-spectacled, hairy-forearmed Wayne, who would come to crush on me and fix my metallic green’64 Volkswagen Beetle on the cheap when it not infrequently acted up.

All things considered, my nineteen-year-old self felt like she’d hit the jackpot.

In that beguiling, freshly white-walled apartment came the heady rush of independence and first tries at defining home on my terms and with my own unique style. My first furnishings were paltry: a small, nondescript dresser and a rough-grained oak telephone table, leftovers after a great grandmother was moved to a nursing home; a full-sized mattress and box spring set, plunked on the floor; and a handmade occasional table with inlaid wood top. It was a special treasure, not merely for its good looks but because it was the first piece of furniture I ever purchased, rescued from a musty, crowded Salvation Army thrift store down on a sketchy stretch of Forest Park Boulevard. I flanked the table with two canary-yellow, canvas-over-metal butterfly chairs… pilfered from my other grandmother’s back yard.

I brought more into the apartment: a laminate-top kitchen table with four vinyl and chrome chairs; a rust and gold plaid polyester hidea-bed sofa; a chunky Craftsmen-style coat tree; a simple, short and long bookcase that would eventually double up as plant stand and television perch. I bought second-hand filing cabinets, got an old flat-planed door, and set up a desk.

The kitchen, though, was poorly appointed. It offered an ancient gas stove, old farmhouse-style sink with ribbed drain board, open to the floor below, and a noisy refrigerator so petite that even I, at 5’2”, could see its top. There was just one cabinet, above the sink, and it wasn’t enough.

In came the unassuming little four-drawer chest. It fit perfectly with its back against the stove’s side, and it adequately stored silverware and small gadgets and dishcloths. While functional, it was also as plain vanilla and uninspiring as the long expanse of white wall on the other side of the room.

When I got permission from the landlord to paint, he probably wasn’t imagining the loud fuchsia, gold and purple stripes I’d sashay diagonally up that wall and down another. Not long after the walls got dressed, Grandma’s little chest got its first coat of paint, too—a vivid tangerine orange.

I didn’t foresee it, but that bright and happy chest would be the first in a lifetime of creative, one-of-a-kind furniture painting.

Eventually, of course, I moved on from Dale Street—to another apartment, another state, condos, town homes, and other houses. My early possessions trickled along with me, and then not, as life grew and needs changed and style matured.

But the little chest soldiered along with me, through marriage and children and divorce and nest emptying. It changed drawer pulls and wore new coats of different colors; it was stripped down and stained; stripped again and painted. It sat in hallways, next to chairs, and alongside a few beds, holding toys and tools, linens and orphaned leftovers. It was the only material piece connecting me to that grandmother, those first days of independence, and all the ensuing days of my curlicued adult life.

When my grandmother died, peacefully but frustrated—she was ninety-nine and so hoping to see one hundred—I was compelled yet again to bring new life to the little chest.

I layered on several coats of glossy black, found a stencil I liked and dabbed through it with a happy, grass-green acrylic. White porcelain knobs formed the eyes of flowers. The freshly whimsical chest went next to my bed, on the side where I slept, and into it went my less worn but more precious jewelry: heirlooms such as wedding rings, antique hat pins and rhinestone hair clips; my freshman cheerleader megaphone pendant; faded obituaries; a made-from-the-other-grandma’s-buttonbox necklace; and other small touchstones chronicling my fifty-five years of life.

I enjoyed this last incarnation of the chest only for a short while, until the fire came and annihilated it and other accumulated treasures: a vast collection of artwork; my great grandfather’s rocking chair that soothed my children—and me—during their early years; the checkerboard set my son made me in ceramics class; the one-hundred-button necklace my daughter strung together in celebration of her first one hundred days of kindergarten. The 1980s rustic pine table, sprinkled with gashes and alpha-numeric indentations left over from homework assignments completed with concentrated effort. I mourn their loss. Still.

I also mourn my mother’s wedding dress, which I’ll never share with my daughter or anyone else, and the antique laces and linens passed on to me from multiple generations. I yearn to see and hold once more the cloisonné and blown glass frogs my late sister added to my decades-long collection.

I miss my books. Oh, so much, my books. Especially the dog-eared, spine-broken, penciled-in-the-margins ones I’d kept since high school and college. Classic literature, contemporary fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, collections of Indian and Holocaust and Third World history and literature, and three shelves of writing reference material. As well, all my years and pages of pre-digital writings, longhand and by typewriter, that told the stories of dreams and life.

I long for the way that chest and those so many other things threaded together a life’s history: moments in time, a multitude of conversations, countless celebrations, even the simple inhalations and exhalations that marked the passage from one day to the next. I want to go back and breathe in the magical air about them, that intangible, indefinable sense of home they collectively imbued.

And that’s the painful rub when someone reminds me that “things can be replaced.” A house can be replaced; the home that’s created inside of it occurs over a lifetime.

That hasn’t stopped me from trying again. It may be plain dumb luck that my insurance coverage sucked because the compensation hasn’t accommodated the purchase of “all new” anything. Instead I’ve cultivated some dandy second-hand chops all over again and in so doing, made a heartwarming discovery—I’ve brought story into this house.

I don’t necessarily know the story behind the antique chest that serves as base for the TV or whose private lives lived inside the $100 dresser or how many meals were passed at that gorgeous hunk of new-to-me dining room table. But their long lives surely hold stories and some days, many more days now, it’s almost as if they are whispering and high-fiving each other over their success in making “from scratch” start to feel like home.

A home that is emerging, if you can believe it, on another Dale Street.

These days when more well-intended people find their own silver linings for me in the strange, otherworldly aftermath of total loss, I listen and sometimes even agree with them. Yes, without a doubt, I am blessed simply to be alive. I’m still not certain that I’m blessed to recreate from scratch a wardrobe, a household, a life. But I do understand that things are just things and some, indeed many, can be replaced.

But the little chest and all the other lifetime vessels of memory, emotion, progress, witness? Never.