More Fire Stuff!

My sister, Serinda, posted this link with good photos of Slave Lake. 

Nunu reported that my mom had only 20 minutes to pack up her stuff before she had to flee, and like the good Payne woman she is, she ran out that door with knitting needles and swimsuit in hand. So funny. I love my mom. I think my suitcase always has an old swimsuit in it, you know, just in case and because I am my mothers daughter. I am also my mothers daughter because when Eve called yesterday to update me, I was hunting for treasures at the GoodWill, which my mom says the Slave Lake Refugee camps are like... 'but you don't have to pay!'. So funny. I am glad she still has her lightheartedness with her even though she can't return for a couple of weeks or so (fires pending) to what I imagine to be an incredibly smoke damaged house that still stands (thank the Lord in heaven).

You know what is strange about this? Just last week I was composing a blog post all about how I miss my home town. Here is what I wrote:

"i come from a pretty small town in nowhere, northern alberta. there is a lot of oil there, though. maybe there is even more oil there than there are people. i'm not sure, i haven't been there since last summer, so i'll check next time i visit. when graduation comes everyone just can't wait to get away from such a small town. to go to school, to go to the big city, to go anywhere but home.

isn't modernity a crazy thing? we can go virtually anywhere we want and it will only take a few days or so to get there. you can get as far away from home as you want to. all things being equal, you can have adventures wherever you want to. take for instance moi. i went on lots of adventures when i was a little girl. then when i was a teenager i left my country and went a thousand miles south to go to university. i even went to university in paris for 4 months. then i went on a mission thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away to thailand. then i went back to canada to a city 600 kilometers away from my home town. now i am adventuring it up a few thousand miles south and east of my last home. adventures are pretty safe these days. i haven't met any peril as i crossed the planes of canada, america, france, or thailand. easy breezy adventures on planes, trains, and automobiles. my husband didn't die carrying people over frozen rivers, i have all my appendages, picked up some language skills along the way, and have some great photographs to prove it all. this is CRAZY. society is nuts. the mobility we have is nuts. do you guys ever feel this way too?

i feel like there is an ache within me to go to a place where people have known me since i was 4 days old. i want to live on the street i grew up on. i want to see my highschool english teacher on a daily basis. i want to have relationships with the kids from my sunbeams class. i wanted to actually know more than 27 people at my wedding reception. i want my piano teacher to teach my future kids how to play the piano. i want to go to my favorite mall and meet up with my sisters for lunch.

i feel an ache within my soul for home. for familiar things, people, and places. being a stranger for a year, two, or three, having adventures is kind of lonely sometimes. and besides culture, language, and foliage; things seem to be the same everywhere i go. people love their families. people work, eat, sleep, recreate. some places they eat bugs and in some places they eat food made with only the finest butter. but eating is eating and work is work. and it will be that way no matter where i go. so why can't i just go home?"

And now the street I grew up on burnt down and so did my piano teachers house! I loved that piano. This is all so strange. My best friends parents house burned down. But, praise be, the house of my teenage years is still up and so is my parents lively hood, so these are good things. Life will continue to go on, and I think Slave Lake will do an awesome job rebuilding.