A Legal Alien

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27 February 2006

Last night, I was enjoying a peaceful night's rest when the doorbell rang. At 2:30am. It didn't just ring once. It was over, and over, and over. I got up and went to the door, not to open it, but to look out at who would be ringing our doorbell on a stormy night. My dad woke up just as the man ringing the bell ran off down the street. He waited a minute and then went outside. I was standing in the living room thinking, I wonder if the fence blew down. No wait, I smell smoke. I said, "Dad? Is our house on fire? I smell smoke!" I looked out the front door and my dad comes running back in the house and said, "I think something is on fire in the back!" So I run for the back door in their bedroom, waking up my mom who heard none of this. The backyard is full of smoke and we can hear the fire trucks but have no idea where the fire is. It wasn't our house or the people right behind us.
After a few minutes, my dad pulls on some trousers and says he's going to find out where the fire is. We all climb into the car, hearts still racing that it's someplace behind our house. The fire was in some duplexes half a block away but our house was directly downwind of the fire. Someone had been going down the street ringing doorbells to wake people up to check their roofs. It was a horribly windy night last night with intermittent rain. We have a tile roof on our house so there was no worries for anything here but everyone round us has a shingle roof. Our neighbour was up checking his roof for embers and we watched from the balcony as the hook and ladder truck doused the flames from overhead.
I finally fell asleep with the smell of smoke and burning tar all through our house. The fire trucks were still out there at 8am when I left to return my dad's apnea machine but by the time I got home about 10, they were gone. There was a brief blurb on the news but I missed the main report about what happened.
Waking up at 2:30am has bad memories for me. Four years ago, I was woken up at 3am by someone trying to come in my front door. A frantic 911 call and 9 police cars later, they caught the guy who was drunk, lost, and ringing doorbells to get help to find his way home. Apparently he decided my house looked like a good place to just try and walk into. Needless to say, we did some serious bulking up of the front door locks, installed new lighting and I still slept horribly for a month or two. It didn't help any that my dog was stone deaf.
Too much excitement at our house for one day!

For Paul Barrett

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