Greetings, friends. Happy Imbolc to all who celebrate! And also a Happy Lunar New Year!
Yesterday was also Groundhog’s Day, which will always make me think of my mother, because it was unquestionably her favorite secular holiday.
I don’t think it was because she spent half her life living in Pennsylvania, the cultural and spiritual home of the holiday. Although I’m sure that didn’t hurt.
My mother was not always great with quotidian minutiae, but she loved a grand gesture. She was a big one for birthdays, because birthdays are a prime opportunity for grand gestures, like throwing a party.
Throwing a party gave my mother the opportunity to exercise her many creative talents: Designing invitations, decorating a space, making elaborate themed food items, the works. So each year throughout my childhood, she would make a point of throwing a party for her friends and family to celebrate Groundhog’s Day.
This made sense to my mother for a number of reasons. By early February, the winter holidays are over, but the Jewish spring holidays of Purim and Pesach are still far off. Summertime was reserved for Colonial re-enacting, so Memorial Day through Labor Day was marked off, and suddenly you’re in autumn again. And, thinking back, my mother’s first husband, with whom she was always friendly, had cornered the local market on Halloween parties. Then it was Thanksgiving and suddenly the winter holiday season again.
So Groundhog’s Day came each year at a time when a party was sorely needed but in relatively short supply. Also, my mother had a somewhat perverse sense of humor, so making a big social deal out of an oddball non-holiday was entirely on-brand for her.
Finally, although my mother was not a pagan in any normal sense, she had a wide spiritual streak. Imbolc, and its Christian twin Candlemas, were not her traditions. But I do think that throwing a celebration of the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox was satisfying to her in a way that she may not have been aware, or, at least, not initially.
(I wish I could share an image of one of her hand-drawn or collaged and photocopied Groundhog’s Day party invitations. I will have to dig them out of storage.)
Even later on, after she moved to New Hampshire, and was less connected socially, she could still be relied on to call up or send a text message to wish a Happy Groundhog’s Day.
So believe me when I say that it is profoundly, almost disturbingly, weird to me that my mother’s old house nearly burned down on Groundhog’s Day.
First and most importantly, as far as I know, the nice couple to whom we sold the place made it out safely, and no one was hurt.
But even more uncanny than the fact of this house fire is how I found out… or, I should say, how my sister found out.
Out of the blue, I received a text message from Adah last night. The Facebook algorithm had, in its inscrutable and terrifying wisdom, delivered her a post from a group called Granite State Alerts, depicting firefighters hard at work on a very, very familiar house… while the fire was still in progress.
Which meant that now I, too, was staring at photographs, taken a mere eight minutes previous, of firefighters responding to a two-alarm fire, tromping around in full gear… atop the roof of my mother’s former home of 30 years.
Adah reminded me a little later that, when she was in second grade, her elementary school hosted a little fire safety lecture from the local fire chief. She came home that afternoon and dutifully informed our parents that her bedroom on the second floor was unsafe, due to a lack of fire exits, and basically the next thing they knew, they were buying her a fire escape ladder. This is, to be fair, pretty on brand for my sister.
So it was even weirder still that the few photos from last night give the impression that the fire itself originated in the room she slept in for years? The same room I slept in when I was taking care of that old place?
According to the only news article on the subject, the fire started “in a closet upstairs”. There weren’t any outlets in the closets. Was it a light fixture? How does a fire start in a closet?
According to scanner chatter, the homeowner checked the breakers and then went to the attic, where the breaker was tripping, and found it filled with smoke.
Your guess is as good as mine. The firefighters used water from my mother’s beloved brook to put the thing out.
As uncanny as it was for me, I can sympathize but not quite empathize how profoundly strange this must be for my sister. I never actually spent more than a few days at a time there, until it came time to empty it out for sale. She, on the other hand, grew up in that house… but it was also the house where our family came apart, where our mother grew sick and helpless and died. I think it’s fair to say my sister hated that house.
Our mother loved that house. Living in a drafty old original New England colonial was my mother’s consolation for having to move to New Hampshire when my stepfather was hired there. Our parents put an ungodly amount of work into that house, as Adah reminded me. That house, and the land, and the brook that ran through it, meant peace and quiet and security to our mother.
Over the years, the house became just like her, and my mother became just like the house. It was old and rambling and messy and overflowing with countless objects, many valuable and interesting but also many worthless, and it too grew decrepit, too big and old and full of memories and stuff to maintain properly.
My mother decided that she would rather die than have to move out of that house. And, indeed, that is just what she did.
My mother was as superstitious as any scientist you’ll ever meet. If it was some other house than some other old lady had died in, my mother would probably have guessed aloud that the fire had been the work of the ghost of the former inhabitant. The divine hag, lighting the traditional fire on Candlemas, on Imbolc. On Groundhog’s Day.
But my mother’s phantasm, no matter how anguished, would never have tried to escape that house by destroying it. It was an original New England colonial, and she had far too much reverence for historical authenticity to try a thing like that.
My mother’s ghost persists elsewhere, regardless. Her website domain auto-renews tomorrow.
If you’re still reading this, I wish you a Happy Groundhog’s Day! I hope that you and yours are all safe tonight. We shall see what tomorrow brings. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est.