Our Grosse Pointe home went up in flames as Mom and I watched

Mom and I stood on the curb and watched my childhood home burn.

She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t angry. She was perfectly calm. She said nothing.

Then she whispered quietly, “We have to find Henry.”

A crowd of spectators packed the tree-lined street late Monday as firefighters uncoiled their water hoses to battle the raging fires on Washington Road between Kercheval and Waterloo in Grosse Pointe. Flames had already devoured the two-story brick colonial next door to my mom's house, where Mrs. Smith used to sit and practice her organ.

On Monday, between 10 p.m. and midnight, that home at 571 Washington Road burned to the ground. The home had been undergoing renovation for months. Construction equipment sat in the front yard.

Witnesses said they watched flames jump to my mother’s Tudor, where she has lived 52 years. It is the home she bought with my father just after I was born.

“We carried you in our arms when we moved in,” Mom said on this cold night. "That house was really special."

The roof on her house collapsed while we watched.

One witness said his son smelled smoke all the way from their home at University and Charlevoix.

“We heard sirens,” the young father said, tucking his hands deeper into his pants pockets. “It was just starting when we got here. They didn’t have the hoses going yet and it took awhile to get the ladders set up.”

All this time, people recorded video amid the popping sounds. The night air was filled with smoke. Our eyes stung.

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Mom asked again about Henry. We hoped he had escaped.

Across the street, a neighbor had replaced Mom’s slippers with snow boots and gave her a sweater. Oh, and a small glass of Bailey’s Irish Coffee. Mom doesn’t usually drink, but tonight she made an exception.

Mom went inside the nearby home of Cynthia Mack as TV crews started to arrive. Together, they watched her house crumble through the bay windows.

At one point, it looked as if the firefighters went to hack apart our old French doors. Flames simply would not extinguish. All her artwork collected over the years. Her Stickley furniture. Her Mary Cassatt prints. Her carefully framed photos of her sisters and her daughter and her granddaughter.

It wasn’t the dollar value of anything that saddened her, just the memories.

Ted Mack stood on the sidewalk reflecting. He had saved Mom’s life.

At the sight of flames across the street from his home, he rushed to Mom's front door and pounded. When she answered, he gently took her hand and led her away.

“I saw flames coming out of all the windows next door, like a silent fire. I saw people calling 911,” Mack said. “The fire was spreading fast. Now it has been burning for more than two hours. It’s a total loss."

Ironically, when the house next door sold, everyone buzzed with joy about a popular contractor who would improve everybody’s home values with another flip sale. In this case, things didn’t work out that way. After months of work on the remodel, it was destroyed.

After hours of waiting and watching, a man dashed over and shouted, "Does the cat have a blue collar?" He said Henry had been found upstairs. “I’m the mayor. Please take my cell number and know that I’m here to help in any way.”

Then he hugged Mom.

Firefighters had strapped an oxygen mask on kitty. He was howling in fear and pain. Rescue workers said we needed to get him to the ER right away, with smoke-damaged lungs and burned paws. A Grosse Pointe Farms emergency worker called ahead.

We dashed up to Shelby Township and admitted a pet who slept with my mom every night. He was trembling, soaking wet from the firehose water.

One neighbor had provided us blankets to wrap the frightened animal. Another neighbor gave Mom a coat to wear.

Hotspots remained well past 3 a.m. Workmen were digging with a backhoe in an attempt to access and shut off a gas main, workers said.

Two firefighters told Mom her house was a total loss.

“Can I rebuild?” she asked.

Firefighters said investigators would thoroughly examine the facts. Two houses, destroyed by flames. Firefighters were working through the night.

“We’re not going anywhere,” said a lieutenant, who kept saying to my mother how sorry he felt.

Mom had been reading in her bedroom when Ted Mack came to her door. Her newly installed fire alarms hadn’t gone off yet. Mack even remembered to ask for her car keys and moved her Toyota out of the driveway.

She called me to say that the house next door blew up, her house was on fire and she planned to look for the cat. Twitter users were already posting images.

By 3:22 a.m., a Salvation Army truck had set up on Washington Road to feed the first responders. Mom asked whether she might have a bag of potato chips. She has always donated to the Salvation Army, she said, and never knew about this. She stood crunching the chips. “These are delicious.”



The whole thing felt like a dream in slow motion. Mom hated that the media reported an elderly woman had been evacuated. She has always been private about her age because she looked years younger than her driver’s license indicated.

“Cookie,” she said, “I don’t even have a toothbrush. I don’t have shoes. I don’t even have underwear. I just don’t know if I’m going to be OK.”

Then she looked at her cell phone and called the Grosse Pointe Public Library to leave a message saying all her books and videos had gone up in flames. Nothing would be returned on time.

"I don't have anything to read," Mom said, as she climbed into bed at 5:35 a.m. Tuesday.

Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-222-6512 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid.