By Kyle Melnick and Bobby Ross Jr. | Washington Post
My part of the story:
Drew Boers, a 75-year-old retired beer distributor, and his wife, Julie, sat at a folding table Sunday afternoon in the driveway of their neighbor’s home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which escaped the flames unscathed. The scene might have resembled a neighborhood block party — except for the heavy smell of smoke in the air and the homes burned to the ground across the street, including the Boers’s place.
A group from the nearby Countryside Church made hot meals for fire victims digging through the ashes. As Boers talked about the chicken and dumplings he had enjoyed moments earlier, a white American Red Cross van stopped to offer help and food.
“You can’t beat the food they’ve got here,” Boers said with a chuckle while thanking the Red Cross volunteers for their concern.
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Boers, a father of four, was spraying his backyard with a water hose Friday afternoon when he realized the fire was approaching his house. Boers and his wife evacuated with their wallets, phones and cars, but they lost almost everything else. The couple’s brick mailbox looked untouched Sunday, but the brick entryway and ashes were all that remained of their ruined home.
“You can replace furniture,” Boers said. “But what we lost that we can’t replace are my high school yearbook and photo albums that are from the predigital age because they’re printed pictures, and things like that.”
“We keep thinking of more things,” he added. “So we’ll be sad for a while, but then we’ll probably rebuild, and life goes on.”
Faith. Family. Fastballs. 