Thankful

The other day, my husband and I were alerted to a fire in our house by neighbors we haven't met and a passerby that we don't know.

We put our cats in the basement for the night (we both have allergies and the cats also yowl outside the door). We watched the news and then watched a tv show so about 90 minutes had passed. I went to our room to brush my teeth and my husband heard a knock at the door.

Our water heater, fairly new with some other attachments occasioned by our remodel, but oil fired since the stable became a residence in 1979 (the water heater was far newer than that), had set itself on fire. There isn't any other way to describe it. The water heater was not just burning fuel to heat the water but was on fire from that fuel spreading smoke throughout our basement and luckily sending some of that smoke up the chimney flue to which it was attached.

The neighbor, whom we did not know, alerted a passerby who knocked on our door while she went inside to call us. We had not met this neighbor at all and the only reason she had our phone number was that she had sent a note about a week ago welcoming us to the neighborhood to which I replied by phoning her cell and leaving a message.

So happenstance was the remarkable savior of not just our cats who were in the smoke filled basement, and not just our house which would have been destroyed, but the two of us. My husband and I took a bottle of champagne to the neighbor to thank her for her intervention, without which I probably wouldn't be writing this today