Pat Strickland stepped carefully into what was supposed to have been her new home.
The boxes she had carried into the duplex the night before were gone. The fire had destroyed everything, she thought.
Then she looked carefully at one of the piles of rubble. Lying in the black soot was the Military Mother’s Star she had proudly displayed in her window during her son’s two tours of duty in Iraq. The picture frame was gone.
“There was just a piece of paper,” Strickland said. “That’s all I could see right there, that Mother’s Star lying on top of the rubble It was wet, but nothing else was identifiable around it.”
Strickland and her two daughters, Vanessa, 14, and Alicia, 21, were staying with a friend until they could get the place cleaned and everything unpacked.
She stopped by the duplex at 338 Eastman Drive to pick up a paper she needed between 12:30 and 1 p.m., then went on about her errands. Alicia called city hall when she got off work to see about a speeding ticket. When she gave the clerk her new address, the clerk said a fire had been reported that day, Aug. 29th, at that address.
“Mom, I think our house is on fire,” Alicia told her mother on the phone.
“Sure enough, everything was gone,” Strickland found.
She first thought of all the family photographs, especially the kid’s baby pictures. They were packed in a box which was left in the garage because the house was full. “I found some ruined pictures, but I found some boxes that were good.
“For the most part, we saved all our pictures,” Strickland said.
She found other treasures in the charred boxes in the garage. The Japanese figurines Shawn, her son, had sent her from Japan. Silk pictures. Sea shells. A drum Shawn found in a ditch while running along side a road in Japan.
Another discovery surprised Strickland as she dug through the rubble. “Any box that had something religious packed – the majority of the stuff in those boxes were okay,” she said.
Her piano music survived the devastation, but not the piano bench it was laying on. There was no sign of the bench. The sheets of music were wet, but not burned.
The Stricklands didn’t know, but their friends at the Nazarene Church hadn’t lost any time finding a new home for the family. A friend knew of an empty house, and by the time Strickland got away from the duplex and over to see the house, it had been turned into a home.
“The church brought in a washer and dryer, a microwave, they had beds set up and made for each one of us,” Strickland said. “There was a couch and a rocking chair. For the next couple of days… people from the church were (bringing) more stuff for us.”
The Red Cross and Salvation Army have pitched in along with several other organizations. A fund has been established for the family at CornerBank.
“It’s just been fantastic, You find out who your real friends are,” she said. “They really gathered around us.”
Strickland has gone from part-time to full-time at Dollar General. Alicia is working at Sunshine Day Care. Vanessa is a freshman. Shawn started college at Wichita State University.
“You sure don’t realize what you’ve got until you don’t have anything,” Strickland said.
