Grief pushed me into the kitchen, where I found unexpected comfort in baking pies for strangers. I never imagined that one day, a pie would show up for me and change everything.
When I was 16, I watched my entire world literally vanish in smoke. However, the grief I experienced led me to start baking pies for hospice patients and those in need.
Little did I know that my selflessness and loving heart would have a major payout.
The tragedy that changed my life forever occurred on one of those freezing January nights, when the cold was so intense that the windows wept.
I was curled up in bed with my earbuds in, tuning out the familiar laughter between my parents as they watched television.
Then I smelled it, smoke mixing with frost, thick and sharp. I pulled my earbuds out just as the fire alarm screamed.
My dad burst into my room, his boots thudding against the hardwood.
He didn’t say anything. He just grabbed me by the arm, dragged me down the stairs barefoot, and pulled me out through the front door into the snow-covered yard in my pajamas.
Then he turned around and ran back inside to get my mom and grandpa.
He never came out again, and neither did my mom or my grandpa.
The blaze took all of them.
They reported that the fire originated from an electrical issue in the kitchen.
The blaze didn’t just take my family.
It took the house, the savings, the photos, and the little ceramic horse my mom gave me on my tenth birthday. Everything.
Except me.
I wasn’t sure I deserved to be the one spared.
And after that tragic incident, I stopped living. I was drifting.
I ended up in a community shelter after a local volunteer service helped me get a room.
They called it a dorm-style housing program for displaced youth, but it felt more like a halfway world stuck between disaster and a question mark.
I shared a room with another girl who never spoke.
There were two bathrooms per floor and a kitchen shared with about 20 others.
But it was warm, safe, and clean. I had a bed, and I was grateful.
I could’ve ended up with family, but Aunt Denise, my mom’s older sister and only living relative, said she didn’t have room for me.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, but there’s no space here,” she told me over the phone.
“Your uncle uses the spare room for work. And I’m not giving up my reading nook for a teenager.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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