Head Stories

Over vegan French toast a friend of mine reminded me about some valuable information today. It changed the tenor of my day, immediately.

It’s the idea of “head stories.” Stories we tell ourselves about things that we need/want to do, or situations we may find ourselves in.

What is a head story?

Like this: Oh, god, I don’t want to call Suzanne because she always keeps me on the phone too long and I end up getting resentful. I know if I call her I’ll be on the phone at least an hour.

How do you know? You don’t know that.

Yes, yes I do know. She always does it.

But you can’t know that she’ll keep you on the phone.

Oh, yes, believe me. I know.

You might believe she will, or you might be afraid she will or you might remember that she has in the past, but you can not know she will keep you on the phone for at least on hour this time.

So, dreading it, I call Suzanne.

We talk for 8 minutes. A sweet connection.

Head stories. I wrecked at least an hour of my day telling myself stories and believing they were true. They were not investigative, journalistic reporting.

They were damn convincing fiction.

Fire, too

About 1:00 p.m. Shep, Charlie and Keith; and then I, a bit later, went up to the house. A new blaze had broken out. By about 4:30 they had it out, finally after 3 separate attempts in two days.

This is the side entrance into the bathroom.



My walk home with the small, double roof of my house barely showing on the right.

It's all different now.

Fire!

Saturday, December 2, 2007 about 3:00 p.m. I saw from my kitchen window smoke up at the house and called 911. A few seconds later Judy called and left a message on my machine telling me that the house was burning.

I couldn’t take pictures of the first fire. My batteries were drained from a trip to Florida a week earlier and I was too full of adrenaline after getting Judy's call to find fresh ones. I couldn’t have taken them anyway once I got there and saw...

photo by Priscilla Holcomb

The photos that follow are from 12/3/2007. The blurry, bluish ones were taken about 6:00 am. I called 911 to report smoke billowing out of the house. The Fire department responded and put it out.

Skeletal spruce. The ass't fire chief said her son got trapped when this tree went up in flames. She said he knew he was in trouble immediately and was really scared. He looked for his partner (firefighters work in pairs at all times for this reason) and realized that she had gotten to the other side of the tree just as it went up and didn't know what had happened. He figured his only way to survive was to kick the fence down. His partner realized quickly what had happened and from the other side, she helped him tear the fence down.

Here is the missing section of fence the firefighters tore down.

About 1:00 p.m. Shep, Charlie and Keith; and then I, a bit later, went up to the house. A new blaze broke out. By about 4:30 they had contained it finally.

[photos not uploaded yet]