December marks six months since the house fire that changed my family’s world dramatically.

Our beautiful home on what we call the best street in the best neighborhood in the best town, partially burned down. My husband and my dog were home with me at the time the fire started. My two teenage sons were both at work. We are all safe. We have temporary housing. We have an amazing support network of family, friends and neighbors. I simply don’t know what I would have done without them.

I won’t go into all of the details of the fire here because I’d like to focus on some of the unique challenges of this traumatic event and being displaced from our home have created for trying to live a less wasteful lifestyle. As an environmental educator, I have talked to many people (mostly children) about simple steps that can be taken to live a little greener. I focus on starting somewhere that is manageable and then build from there. I focus on the magic of “-ISH” that allows us to be imperfect along the journey to being green.

Because I am GreenISH, I can say I had many areas of my lifestyle that I still needed to make more eco-friendly choices even before the fire. Sure, I try to reduce waste at the point of purchase. I thoughtfully recycle what cannot be avoided. I backyard compost to divert about 10 pounds of kitchen waste per week. I am learning to embrace purchasing consignment and second hand clothing to avoid fast fashion. But there are so many areas of life that I needed to improve, particularly with hair and beauty products. I guess I’m saying that I was already far from perfect and the house fire added a few layers of complication to living an eco-focused lifestyle.

Now after 6 months I am ready to try to capture my thoughts and experiences as a house fire victim and will break it all up by topics. I want to tell you about all of the stress of watching your belongings that didn’t burn go into a giant dumpster headed for the landfill. I want to tell you how grateful I am for the professionals who came into our home to help us sort through the complicated situation of “salvageable” versus “non-salvageable”. I want to tell you about my EV and how I keep having to defend the EV lifestyle when many wanted to blame my car and garage charger for the fire (this was not the cause, BTW). I want to tell you what it feels like to have to touch, account for and make hard decisions about every single thing my family owns, from the valuable Lego sets right down to the paperclips.

For now I will simple say THANK YOU to the Cary and Apex North Carolina fire departments for their quick response, their brave actions in fighting the fire, their kindness to our family during a traumatic period and their professionalism in saving our home from completely burning down.