It has been a very difficult week in Unity for a lot of people. A sense of tragedy hangs everywhere. Those of you who visited this summer or fall and walked down the lane to the Farmer's Market with us will probably remember the 3 children, the mildly autistic triplets, whose house is across the lane from the Heron's back yard. They were often out on their tricycles or playing in a pool. On Wednesday just before sunset that house went up in flames and they were in it. Melissa saw the smoke from the kitchen window and called it in, and she stayed with Carmen, the mother, until the ambulance got there. They fought the fire for hours. It was a cold night. When the water they sprayed fell on the ground, it froze. We served coffee to firemen and policemen; Vickie from the College kitchen brought an urn of hot chocolate. The fire chief had a heart attack and died while running a water line. There are no fire hydrants here; every house has its own well. The fire departments have tanker trucks. They set up a plastic pool; the trucks dump their water into it and go to a pond for a refill. The fire fighters pump it from the pool into their hoses. Everyone has talked and processed it for days now. Everyone has had bad dreams and felt disturbed. How could the fire have started? How could it have burned so fast that the boys couldn't be rescued? Investigators from the fire marshall's office spent a few days examining the burnt house; first they had to set up propane heaters and tarps to melt the ice that had formed where water was sprayed.

There were a lot of reporters around for days. Melissa served the investigators lunch in our dining room on Saturday just so they could get away from the media. Links to newspaper articles about it are here and here and here. An interview and picture of Melissa were on the front page of the Portland Sunday paper. She happened upon that paper on Tuesday when she was in Border's looking for a Boston Globe to find out why people in Massachusetts were calling her to find out where to send donations. A couple of days ago, a big front loader thing knocked down what was left of the house, dug a hole and pushed it in. The family says the land will just become a park. Tomorrow there will be a memorial service for the boys at the Unity College gym, the largest room in town, and a fund raising supper in the evening. How do you have a memorial service for 3 six year olds? Well first you blow up a lot of balloons...

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