Hope from the ashes

Teresa Rose is sitting under an umbrella in her front yard when Mark Mason approaches.

His job — running electricity from the Roses’ backyard workshop to their swimming pool — was complete.

“Ok,” he said. “Now you can go swimming, darlin’.”

Teresa jumps up from her chair.

“How much do I owe you?” she says.

Mason smiles.

“You don’t owe me nothin’,” he says. “Not a thing.”

Teresa begins to cry.

“I need to give you something,” she says, her voice breaking.

“No,” Mason replies. “I’ve been there. I told you. We lost everything we had in 2019 to the same thing.”

Teresa, her hands covered in ash, wipes tears off her left cheek.

“But what you bought and your supplies,” she says.

Mason throws his hands up and shakes his head.

“That’s the least I can do for you,” he says.

Teresa turns to her husband, Nick.

“She loves her pool,” Nick says. “It’ll give her back some normalcy.”

Teresa looks back at Mason.

“But no,” she says. “You’ve been here all morning.”

The electrician looks over his shoulder at what is left of the Rose’s house — the aftermath of a Sept. 3 fire that cost them, among other irreplicable items, five of their dogs.

You could see in his eyes he was battling.

One the one hand, he didn’t want to come across as disrespectful by dismissing Teresa after what she had just gone through.

But on the other, he knew there was no way he was taking her money.

“It’s alright. My time ain’t nothin’. Ma’am, when we lost our house, the community, the churches, and the neighbors, they came and helped us out. They saved us,” he said. “This is the very least I can do. You don’t owe me a dime. I don’t want nothing from y’all. I want y’all to be happy. I want y’all to recover. That’s what we did. It’s not easy, but it’ll happen. I promise you. Life will get better.”

More tears fall.

“I don’t know when,” Teresa said. “My God. I just don’t know when.”

Mason shakes Nick’s hand and starts to walk away.

But then, he stops and turns back to Teresa.

“It will. I promise you it will,” Mason said. “You won’t ever forget it darlin’, but life will get better. Just hold your head high and keep faith in the Lord.”

•

Teresa had been away from her Grantham home for days.

Showing dogs means long drives and overnight stays in the camper now parked in her front lawn.

So, when she got back to Wayne County, she decided to take it easy.

She hadn’t even taken her clothes back to the house.

But Nick decided to unload the golf cart — to drive it to the garage and plug it in before going inside and kicking back in a recliner with his wife.

“I was dozing off,” Teresa said. “Nick comes in and asks what I’m watching. I don’t know what it was, but it was a Western and it was good.”

He decided to join her.

“He sits back in the recliner and says, ‘I shouldn’t do this.’ He scooted back in the recliner and says, ‘I really shouldn’t do this.’ Then the feet come up and he says, ‘Now, I really shouldn’t do this,’” Teresa said. “I said, ‘It’s Sunday. Do it. Relax.’ So, we were semi-asleep.”

But because he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, “he can’t sleep unless he is touching me or looking at me.” And as he rolled over to look at Teresa, he saw a “flash” come down the driveway.

“It was a friend of ours in a Jeep,” Teresa said. “He says, ‘Why is (he) flying down this driveway?’”

Nick went outside to get an answer to his question.

And moments later, when Teresa opened her eyes, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“I sort of leaned up and he and (our friend) are in the yard fighting. Well, you ain’t fighting my old man cause I’m gonna be dead in the middle of it,” Teresa said. “Then, all of a sudden, this woman is screaming, ‘Get out of your house right now. Get out of your house.’ I’m like, excuse my French, ‘Oh hell no. You ain’t telling me to get out of my house.’”

But when she got outside, her perspective changed.

“That’s when stuff starts going in slow motion,” Teresa said.

The two men were not fighting.

The garage was ablaze, and Nick was trying to run toward it.

“I was trying to get back in there,” Nick said. “He was trying to hold me back.”

Teresa, in a daze, still doesn’t see the flames.

“But then, it hits me what (our friend) is saying. He’s screaming, ‘No bud. You can’t do that.’ He’s holding Nick like a bear,” Teresa said as more tears fell. “Nick’s screaming, ‘I’m getting my wife’s Subaru out from under that garage.’”

A second later, Nick breaks loose and takes off running.

He was no more than 15 feet away from his wife’s vehicle when it explodes.

“When the gas tank exploded, that was horrendous. And all this booming, he spent three years in Vietnam,” Teresa said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God. It sounds like a war here. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.’ If our friend hadn’t held him for that 45 seconds, Nick would have been gone.”

But Nick wasn’t the only one willing to put himself in harm’s way.

The house now burning, Teresa takes off running toward the front door.

Several of the family dogs, including five puppies, are still inside.

“I go running back into the house, but I couldn’t see nothing,” Teresa said, breaking down. “I tried really hard. I tried really, really hard to get my babies.”

Only two, Nick’s service dog, Scooter, and a French bulldog named Sparkle made it out.

•

Walking through the charred remains of her home, Teresa loses control of her emotions.

There were the remains of the “little green bunny thing” she had made during a girls’ day.

“We had the best time doing that,” she said.

And there were the paintings her “dear friend” sold her.

She allows herself to laugh, just for a moment, when she recalls taking home a large jug from an auction.

“This woman was talking about it, and I looked at her and said, ‘Ma’am. That green jug is coming to me. I’m just giving you a heads up,’” she said.

But then, she turns her head and starts crying again.

“That lamp, that’s an antique,” Teresa said. “The fire people couldn’t help it. They couldn’t help it. They had to do this.”

For the Roses, it isn’t the “stuff” that they lost.

It’s the memories tied to each knickknack and piece of furniture.

And for Nick, it isn’t about the house itself. It’s about the fact that he spent nearly a year doing the sewer, plumbing, and electrical work himself.

“Only took me 30 minutes to lose it,” he said.

Still, it isn’t lost on the couple that in the days since the fire, new memories have been made — cherished moments they will remember for the rest of their lives.

They have gotten to see, firsthand, the kindness of friends and strangers — the people who have brought by clothing and toiletries; the ones who have donated food, started a GoFundMe account, and offered prayers; the man who, upon hearing about the fire, spent hours in the heat ensuring Teresa could relax, if only for a few minutes, in her pool and take her mind off her troubles.

“These people, their kindness, we will never be able to pay them back,” Teresa said. “There’s still so much good in this world.”

•

Ten days after the fire, Nick is on an excavator.

He extends the claw and brings it down.

He is determined to take the house apart himself.

It is, he says, the only way he will get closure.

He uses the equipment to drop a pile of debris onto the back yard.

Teresa bends down and begins to comb through it.

“Oh no,” she says, her voice breaking. “The Christmas presents.”

She has been buying them all year — carvings and craft kits and ornaments — to ensure her loved ones feel special when Dec. 25 rolls around.

Seeing the charred remains is too much for her to bear.

“I can’t do nothin’ but cry,” Teresa says. “That’s all I can do.”

In that moment, it was lost on her that while her husband was beginning to tear their burned home down, she was more concerned about the would-be recipients of their acts of love.

And even though the fire took nearly everything they had, they will hold onto what both Teresa and Nick know are the things that, in the end, really matter.

“Life. Life. That’s the most important thing,” Nick said, looking at his wife.

At last, she smiles.

“As long as I have him and I make him happy, that’s all I care about,” she said. “That’s all I care about in the world.”