“Daddy, why do you have a broken old brick on this shelf?” my son asked on a family garage cleaning day in early spring. “It’s got stuff in the middle of it, and this side is black. Is it from the olden days? Are you gonna build something with it?”
I looked up from the box of baby clothes I was sorting. My husband Greg put down the stack of boards he was piling. We looked at Toby, we looked at the brick, and then our eyes met. Yep. It was the one.
“That’s a very special brick, sweety,” I began, “that’s from the fire.”
“You mean when your house burned down?” Toby wondered. “At Auburn? That fire?”
“It wasn’t just our house,” Greg explained, “It was the entire dorm – the whole building. Mommy was one of the girls deans, so we were living inside the dorm when it caught on fire.”
“Do you remember the story, Toby?” I asked him hopefully. “Do you remember what happened?” Read more
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