Accumulated Stuff

This photo was taken from AOL Images of
the Waldo Fire as it nears homes.

While looking at horrendous photos of the different fires in Colorado, I chatted with a friend on the phone. We could not get over the many acres that were burning, and had been burning for quite a few days.  South (Colorado Springs), west (Boulder) north (Ft. Collins) and a new fire near Grand Junction. Our hot temperatures of over 100 degrees was not helping!

"If you had to evacuate your home," I asked, "what would you grab first." We discussed photos, things that could not be replaced, pets, clothes, important papers like passports, birth certificates, etc. We hung up and I looked around my house.  I began making a mental note of all the stuff in every room and wondered what I would take with me if I ever had to leave in a hurry.

There was no way I could take the many albums of photos that I had collected through the years. Six large plastic bins with ten or more albums in each.  Those I would have to leave though I knew they held many memories. My personal computer, which was also loaded with photos and my lap top would have to be packed. I realized I had better put all my important papers in one central place, in one large envelope,  so I could easily take them. What about my children's art work....paintings on the wall and pottery through out the house.  My cameras -- video and still. Then I saw my genealogy notebooks....I had to take them after all the years of research I had compiled. What about my favorite book collection?  There was also my newest project of making photo album books.  My CD and DVD's, and the many boxes of slides of when my children were young. The more I looked around, the more things I wanted to take.

I realized how much the evacuees were losing.  They did not have a lot of time to decide what they would take because as I read some of the articles, they had minutes to get out of the fire line.  When I saw the areas in Colorado Springs with whole tracts of developments in ashes, I got a sick feeling in my stomach.  So many people were being left without any thing. One lady said all she had was what she was wearing while a man said he had left his medication behind. This morning the news report was that 346 homes had burned in the Colorado Springs area.

The majority of the evacuees commented that they could rebuild and that they were thankful that they were alive.  I guess making it out alive is the most important thing and it made me wonder why I think it is so important to have material things.  I recalled a class at Regis about a group of islanders who built their one room home on stilts, fished for their daily food, picked fruit from the near by jungle, had a mat to sleep on, and when waves would wash their homes down as it happened every year, they did not lose anything and they would just rebuild.  Maybe that is how we should live instead of accumulating so many things!