Friday we are allowed back in. Saturday the disaster tourism has begun already. The streets are filled with people. My husband brings his brothers, whom he rarely sees, but they have come today, bringing their wives who have never before been to my home, which is now only an ash pile. I’m not sure I can deal with this and don’t really have time or opportunity to feel it out with myself.

I can deal with loss. My whole life has been a training camp in loss, beginning with my mother leaving for a T.B. sanitorium when I was three, and dying in my early teens. Living most of my life as a motherless child, home has always been important to me. But more than that, I am a nester by nature and have said so in poems – that must make it so.