I was grading freshman essays at home when my daughter called from Longwood at about 9:40 that night, her voice shaking with anxiety. "Mom, Grainger is burning."

Instantly my mind's eye saw my computer melting in the heat and my books crumbling to ashes. Panic-stricken, I blurted a selfish question: "Will they let me in my office?"

Let me explain that reaction. For many professors, our offices are at the heart of our professional lives; even our classroom work begins with preparation in the office. It is where we keep our teaching notes, research materials, publications in various stages of preparation, mementos and awards, committee reports, addresses, tests, assignment sheets, syllabi, student projects, grades, academic regalia, professional records and letters, electronic archives - and our books, too many books, accumulated over the years and annotated over the course of many readings. That night, I frantically wondered what it would be like to lose it all and start over.

As my husband, whose office was also in Grainger, drove us the two miles to campus, the sky glowed like a jack-o-lantern, and a sudden explosion of sparks announced the collapse of the Rotunda. We parked the truck and rushed toward the fire, already feeling its heat on our faces when we rounded the corner two blocks away. Smoke poured out from Grainger's attic as water poured in from the firefighters' hoses. East Ruffner's walls began to give way. We couldn't even get close to the building; rescuing anything from our offices was out of the question.

The next day, a kind of paralysis set in as Grainger's former occupants gathered across Pine Street to stare at our still-smoldering home base. It was time to go to work, but there was no place to go. We were offered temporary access to computers elsewhere on campus, but almost everything we needed to do was locked in our building. We strained to see through the steamy windows, speculating about the condition of our offices. At random moments in most conversations over the next few days, someone would remember where a particular item was and say something like, "Oh, man, my [inscribed book / SACS file / grade sheets / daughter's drawing] was sitting [right on my desk / on the shelf / in a briefcase left open on the chair]. It's probably pulp by now."

Four days after the fire, we started getting answers as a professional recovery team began removing the contents of the building. One at a time, we were ushered inside the makeshift chain-link fence as they hauled our lives' work out on plywood carts. They waited patiently while, with as much dignity as we could muster, each of us in our turn examined what the fire, smoke, and water had left behind. Everything smelled like a stale trash fire, and much of it resembled freshly-made papier-mach.

Seeing my soggy, ink-blurred books, files, and papers wheeled out of the building on those carts felt a lot like watching a loved one being wheeled out of the operating room on a gurney. Difficult as this was, though, worse loss faced those whose offices were on the top floor, where fire damage precluded recovery of anything at all. The rest of us at least had something to start with as we sent our forlorn belongings to the drying room.

As deeply as we felt these losses, it was the absence of our own familiar working spaces that had quite literally changed our lives overnight. The center of gravity that had anchored our activity was now gone. Without it we were gypsies, wandering between home and campus at more or less random intervals. If we happened to bump into a fellow gypsy, we would marvel at how much we missed our desks, our clutter, our routines. Someone remarked, "We drive over and walk around the campus because we don't know what else to do."

Irony is everywhere in a disaster like this. Most of us, for example, had conscientiously backed up our computer files - and then left the disks sitting where they were destroyed along with the computers they were intended to back up. Another example: all the papers lying out on a desk soaked up twice their weight in water and melted to mush, while the potted plant right next to them thrived on the moisture and began to blossom.

A third irony was oddly poetic. On the day of the fire, I had gone to the print shop to pick up handouts that would be part of freshman composition final exams. All 750 copies were sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the department office that night. They were soaked, of course, and became trash in the aftermath. I keep remembering, though, that on the first page of each, Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" observed, "The art of losing isn't hard to master."

The fire certainly proved it; we lost our offices, classrooms, and daily routines with no effort at all. Harder to master is the art of starting over. That is what we're working on now.

Jena Burges
Assistant Professor of English