When he got up in the middle of the night to get his granddaughter a glass of water last November, Ed Parsons of Westhampton smelled smoke and then saw flames shooting out of the bathroom.
Quickly he woke his wife, Trina, who grabbed 3-year-old Lana, and the three ran outside in their pajamas. There they watched as, despite firefighters’ efforts, it took just 15 minutes for the blaze to destroy a farmhouse that had stood for more than a century. The fire started with the heat from a wood stove, which ignited the timber lining the chimney and spread inside the wall, says Trina Parsons. The smoke detector went off, she says, but Ed saw the flames before they heard it and they were already rushing out the door.
Since then, the family has embarked on a journey to rebuild a new home. It’s a process that no family wants to go through, but thousands face every year. In the worst cases, lives are lost to the flames.
Home fires affect more people than floods, tornados and hurricanes combined, according to the American Red Cross. So, it’s not surprising that the majority of 70,000 disasters the Red Cross responds to each year fall into this category.
While the Parsons family was lucky to escape without physical injuries, the healing has just begun.
After a brief stay with relatives across the street, the family has been living in a house on Sylvester Road in Florence rented from Zawalick’s Sugar House farm. In April, construction began on their new home. Painted a darker fire engine red, it is situated on the very spot on Easthampton Road where their former home sat. It is located on a portion of the hundreds of acres comprising Mayval Farm where the Parsons family has worked for six generations, tending the land, raising cows and tapping the maple trees. Ed and Trina had lived in their burned-down house for 35 years.
Crews installing the cabinets and the flooring have been in and out of the new home, working day and night. Plumbers and electricians have come and gone. Ed, Trina and Lana hope to move in at the beginning of next month, but the couple don’t expect all the work to be done until October. The front porch stairs still need to be built and the circuit breakers need to be installed.
At no point in their lives had they imagined that they would be building a house from the ground up.
“I thought the other house would be the one I’d be living the rest of my days in,” said Trina Parsons, 56. She watched her two sons grow up on this land and now is raising their granddaughter here.
The new house, surrounded by rolling hills, sprouted up faster than the family expected. The only reminder of the fire is a scorched, dead tree, which the Parsonses planted years ago when their sons were children.
The past few months have been a blur of picking out new appliances and quick decisions. The bedroom will have carpeting. The house will have two bathrooms. The cabinets will have cherry wood. There will be no dishwasher.
“We’re pretty simple when it comes to our house… I’m not super picky,” said Trina. “It’s just nice to know that I will be able to be home again. This is the longest we have been away from our home in 35 years.”
While it is a relief to see the new house come together, it doesn’t compare to the home that was lost. It’s half the size. It’s one floor, instead of two.
The loss value of the home that burned was a lot more than what the family got from their insurance settlement, says Trina, but she and Ed decided to downsize not because of the money, but because they wanted a smaller house.
Lana Gomes-Parsons, a typically cheerful child, says Trina, likes playing in the barn with the cows at the dairy next door and climbing on the rocks that used to form the foundation of the Parsons’ home.
She picks wild flowers and hides in the tall grasses that have sprouted up around them.
“The stuff she’s been through and she just keeps on going,” Trina said, sitting on her new front porch on a recent afternoon as she watched her granddaughter play.
Most of Lana’s belongings were destroyed in the fire, but she never cried, says Trina.
“My house burned down, all my toys and dolls are gone,” Trina recalled her granddaughter saying after the disaster.
Trina and Ed lost most of their possessions, too.
“It burned everything,” Trina said.
Journals chronicling farm life dating back to the 1800s are gone. Fifty-year-old painted portraits of Trina’s parents were burned. “There were things that we are never going to get back,” she said.
Somehow, their wedding album survived. A bag of sooty belongings is still sitting in the barn next door waiting for someone to go through it, but Trina and Ed aren’t in any hurry.
“To sit there and realize you have lost everything in your life — it does hit you. It’s like mourning a death,” Trina said.
But farm life had to go on.
The family’s more than 100 dairy cows needed to be milked and fed. “Cows don’t wait,” Trina said. Within a couple of days, Ed was back to work.
The farm is his life, Trina said.
Ed grew up working the land. Now, he works from dusk to dawn, and somehow he never comes home in a bad mood, she says.
The family’s homeowners insurance covered a chunk of the cost to rebuild, but not all of it. The rest came mostly from donations, says Ed. After the tragedy, the community rallied to support them.
Ken’s Eyewear store in Northampton donated a new pair of eye glasses for Trina. The day after the fire, the owner of Riff’s Joint restaurant in Easthampton gave the Parsonses a $50 gift certificate. Children sent envelopes with small sums of money. Family from out of state sent new toys for Lana. Donations flooded in, even from anonymous sources.
“It was enough to make me have faith in humanity,” Trina said. “A lot of people donated… It really was unbelievable how the people came out to donate —We would never have believed. When you have a small community, everyone is like family.”
Though it was available, the Parsonses didn’t need emergency assistance from organizations like the Red Cross.
“We had places to go, we have family, we have friends that would have taken us in,” Trina said.
“I knew that we had a great foundation of friends and family, but we really realize it now. We don’t take them for granted.”
Lisa Spear can be reached at lspear@gazettenet.com.