P52 Week 2 - House on Fire

The prompt this week is to tell what items you would take from your house in the event of a disaster such as a fire – after first making sure that all your living loved ones are safe.

My first thought flies in with a warm flush: grab my passport for it would be a huge pain to replace it! Good lord, how would I find my birth certificate half a world away in Australia in the tiny town of Greta, New South Wales? Have the ancient birth registers from the refugee camp where I was born even survived? Other realizations flood in: I have no idea where my U.S. Naturalization papers are. I’ve had name changes. Where’s my first marriage certificate? Where are my divorce papers? Where’s my second marriage certificate? Why did I even decide to change my name – twice! Good grief, I’d have to redo the whole flamin’ passport application process!

Hold on mind afire! I already have a U.S. passport. It has to be a much easier process to replace an existing one. It’s only in the heat of the moment that my first impulse is to fetch it.

All right then, what other items would I retrieve in the event of a fire? Ah, my laptop – devoted keeper of my ‘in progress’ memoir that I have been working on in fits and starts for the past five years. I keep questioning my sanity in embarking on this project for I have no formal writing experience, but I have an inner prompter, a gremlin that regularly re-ignites my resolve to keep at it – to get my story out there.

What else would I take as the smoke swirls about? I would grab my purse and keys and run down to the bottom floor garage. There I would collect a few photo albums. I would scorchingly admonish myself muttering idiot, stupid procrastinator, for I should have long ago scanned all those boxes of photo albums filled with warm memories. There’s no way I’d be able to save them all! I’d huff in disgust, throwing my few precious items in the car. I would drive, clearing the garage in a burst of burning rubber.

How prepared am I for a natural disaster? What kind of order are my affairs in? Hmmm….