Fire Vision

By Nancy C. Folk

Entwined in a labyrinth of distortion, illusion, and delusion, a young woman’s reality is drastically altered when her true identity is revealed in a moment of stunning hostility. Unraveling the web of the past, she discovers core shaking truths, but also strength in the most improbable person and path.
Fire Vision, is a uniquely engulfing narrative of discovery, metamorphosis and a vigorous battle for wellness. A new life beckons for one named Ebba, but the shadows of the past are relentlessly inescapable. In the midst of them she finds herself, and the greatest disguised heroine whom she set out to save, yet in the end is saved by her.
For anyone - especially youth and young adults - facing struggles and seemingly unsurmountable barriers in life, Fire Vision is a tale of strength, resiliency and empowerment. A thriving, sustainable, victorious life is its testimony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973662525

Nancy C. Folk

Nancy C. Folk is the child of a parent with barriers and developmental disabilities, and she utilizes her personal experiences and unique perspectives in helping others with compassion and empathy. Nancy has enjoyed a lifelong career as an educational and human services professional and volunteer in many organizations; she has both undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, including graduate of distinction honors in special education, and she is experienced as a behavioral specialist with a certification in autism education. Today, Nancy is active in her community with service activities and organizations that seek to improve educational, social, and economic capabilities and resources.

Book preview

FIRE VISION

NANCY C. FOLK

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Copyright © 2019 Nancy C. Folk.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9736-6251-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-6253-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-6252-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019907144

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/24/2019

CONTENTS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Acknowledgements

About the author

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

To the

memory of the Emily who gave me life and the Emily whose life I share. My Circle of Life Torch Bearers.

ONE

F ire!

Tearing the soft, cottony bedsheets from my body, I snapped out of the sweet slumber of summer dreams to alert consciousness and jumped out of bed. My feet stabilized me on the familiar linoleum floor.

Sirens wailed and pierced into the midnight hours of the night’s silence. Flashes of red light whipped across the window glass through the overlapping slats of the closed metal blinds, stabbing through the curtain fabric invading our bedroom. My eyes found the room to be illuminated as though the brightest noonday sun were releasing all of its light into our miniscule, earthly cubicle. Rushing to the windows, I found my senses awakened to the fact that it was not daytime but still the middle of the night. All the pajama-clad, semiconscious, rousted neighbors gathered at their doors and windows and out on their porches. Pulling the curtains aside and yanking the cord to pull up the white-gray metal blinds, I saw the emergency lights blaze into the room. Other house members awoke and gathered, focusing on the cacophony outside. Huge pillars of flames towered above the homes across the street and past the next block. Brilliant orange flames seared the black sky, climbing higher by massive leaps and claiming their newfound territory. Smoke plumes poured from the lower sections of the flames, enhancing the intimidating destruction being caused. From our room, we had a clear view.

After taking in all the clamor, processing what happened, and clearing the cobwebs of deep slumber, we realized the industrial plant was on fire.

When the fire was subdued hours later, we returned to our beds. All would be back to normal by morning, and the crisis would be over until the next eruption.

Oddly, that scenario became symbolic of the life path that played out within the walls of that humble house and kept me in its infinitely tentacled reach. I was momentarily calm, then hit with full blaring alarm of crisis, panic, and fear, cycling back to a false sense of mundane normalcy until the next episode, which was always a breath away. Flames roaring tenaciously attempted to pull me into an eternal, dark, smoking, suffocating hold.

Several times over the years, that facility had a fire emergency, and surprisingly, only once did we need to evacuate our homes. Thankfully, that was during the day. On this night, as on the others, every resident went back to bed after the crisis, and it was business as usual the next day.

Upon reflecting on those times with comrades of younger years, I am amazed at the normalization of reaction we had with those alarms, considering the potential danger we were in with such close proximity to the plant. In our agedness, our responses are vastly different from the emergency of personal fires and crises that life used as a catalyst to change us. The symbolism escaped our youthful naiveté but would not be escaped long. Fires illuminate, scorch, and cleanse the journey on life roads beckoning to be taken. This is the journey of one called Ebba. This is her fire tale.

Be warmed.

Fire. A singular word with great capability to evoke strong emotional reaction and associations. A dichotomy of alarm and comfort. When yelled out in distress, it is a cause for panic, drill, and rescue. When spoken in context of a social activity, it brings joy of gathering around fires with friends and family who are coming together for mutual enjoyment, warming themselves by the fire’s glow, roasting food over a firepit, and sharing stories, songs, and good conversation. Fire. An essential element with complex multiple capacities, both destructive and beneficial. An aid to bringing forth new life and beauty, warmth, comfort, and pleasure when tamed—as well as causing devastation. Playing the role of both friend and foe, it demands respect in each part. Flames of refining fires burnish their subject to brighten their luminosity further, scorch to cleanse, painfully purify, and produce from ashes creations lovelier than can be imagined by the human mind. Indeed, the simplest lessons become prophetic in life. Fires from beyond, fires from within.

From one intensely personal, inescapable fire tale, the scorching, purifying flames encompassed two phoenixes who would rise from a pile of ashes. Two lives entwined amid the swirling smoke, leaving their charred embers to become their unique, beautifully designed destiny. An unlikely pairing of parent and child crafted from the fires of seemingly undesirable circumstances of fate and barriers whose boundaries would be broken together. Mama Mitezza and Ebba: perpetual fire survivors.

Little did I realize how life would mimic those building fires in the middle of the night. Blazing and alarming would be each compelling crisis, each one having the potential for disaster. Each created smoke damage and scarring until there needed to be a completely rebuilt facility that would be sustainable and safe. Yet in the end, it was the fires of the crises themselves that created the new, resilient facility. And in the end of one of our life’s many chapters, there would be a resilient, new, beautiful family unit that God would enable to endure the hottest of fires and staunchest of adversities. Unlike the fires at the nearby industrial plant, His refiner’s fires bring beauty, strength, and a purer understanding of His character.

The journey began in such an unusual place for Mama Mitezza and me. It was unusual yet common as most journeys start. The extraordinary out of the ordinary and the uncommon out of the common makes for the remarkable.

Events like the industrial plant fires became as commonplace as the mosquito-spraying truck that rolled down the streets in the summer, cloaking our houses and streets in its foggy pesticide to keep the skeeters from the ponds and rivers under control. When the truck turned the corner, invading and cloaking our street, there was a mad rush to get indoors and close all the windows and doors until the fog dissipated. Fearless, daredevil kids rode their bikes full speed right behind the truck as it spewed its toxic breath, fumigating them in the wake. For the most part, it was simply life in the hood as usual. We were literally and figuratively surviving smoke and fumes.

Our other side of town neighborhood was the usual small-town setup with small blocks of homes wedged into streets, coexisting day to day until a family moved away or someone died. Narrow interconnecting alleys ran behind the streets. Gray sidewalks, some weathered by the scorching-hot summer sun, turned bleak under rain and snow. Gravel alleys endured foot and bike traffic as large, old maple and oak trees stood watchfully over nondescript houses.

Attached row houses and some detached small houses were spaced in close proximity. Ordinary life was lived out on the neighborhood stage as it leaked through connecting walls and drifted unfiltered through the mesh of screened windows and doors. Conversations, music, television shows, laughter, and conflict were sounds of living.

It was an ordinary, commonplace neighborhood in which the kids didn’t know they were on the less-privileged side of town. Here were the blue-collar workers who eked out their livings, doing their best for their families on the lower wrung of the middle-class ladder. Life dwellers were a mix of those who were trudging along at jobs that for some did not have much upward mobility and those who put in their time to apply for the next step to better things. Still others were living out their existence on government assistance. All in all, there was no one who seemed to be worse off than anyone else. Kids played ball in the street for countless hours, rode bikes all over town, and walked to school and across town to play with friends.

At the end of the block lay adventure, imagination, and exploration beckoning with the opportunity for wild abandon—or as much as could be mustered and gotten away with reasonably. Across the faded black asphalt street was a gravel road that led to a grand set of railroad tracks, woods, and ponds. There was a well-worn patch of nearby nature to retreat to for tasting the nectar of honeysuckle, smelling fragrant lilacs, losing balls in the poison ivy and sumac, and swinging on tire swings dangling from thick rope over sturdy tree branches. Wildlife would be spotted and caught by excited kids, who showed off their catch of fish, box turtles, or other creatures unlucky enough to become temporary captives and sensations of the neighborhood. This gem lay directly beyond narrow, fenced-in backyards that connected to thin dirt roads, allowing access by bike or by car looping around to connect to the actual paved streets. It was too much wild abandon to be reined in by the adults.

Roads and narrow yards sourced the kids funneling onto the dirt and grass fields by bike and by foot to do what kids do: outdoor, full-blown, hardcore, old-school play. Scraped elbows. Thick, scabbed knees. Dirty, grit-coated skin. Sweat running down their foreheads and temples, stinging as it leaked into their eyes. Hair matted to their faces. Creases of dirt folded between their fingers and lining the bends of their arms. Rings of dirt clinging around the top edges of dust-coated socks. The only margin separating a small sanctuary of clean was discovered when the socks were peeled off before wading into water or getting ready for a bath. A boundary line of sediment separated stark, unscathed body territory from the earthy, battle-worn regions. Feeling the burn of air as one’s lungs felt they would burst from so many races was glorious.

Most of the local kid crew got along and were amicable. Occasionally there would be those who were mean-spirited, but that didn’t last. Either you ignored them, or they matured out of it. There was always a kickball game to get into, a tree to be climbed, a bird to throw a rock at, and bike riding marathons that went nowhere in particular and lasted all day. The kind of bike riding that made your legs feel like they were still pedaling the bike when you collapsed in your bed at night. A funky feeling that made you giggle in your fatigue.

On this side of town, kids grew up being accustomed to walking for errands to the nearby downtown area to the pharmacy, the post office, and various businesses that ranged from clothing stores, to animal care and home goods. As more business came into the area, our options for shopping and leisure grew along with them: theaters, eateries, and specialty stores were in abundance. After being able to drive, we realized how much we walked, and we wondered how we didn’t wear through our shoes faster than we did. We walked to church, the library, the stores, nearby parks, the local hospital, volunteer meetings, and all over town.

The best place for aromas was a feed mill store by an outdoor wildlife center, which had barrels of various dried feeds and grains with large metal scoops hanging from them by chains. All sorts of animal feed smells delightfully plunged into your sinuses, whisking you into a whole different era of simple times: denim work clothes, farming tools, paper sacks tied with cord, and burlap bags. It was like momentarily walking into a time machine of euphoria that you did not want to return from by crossing back over the passage of rough hardwood floors to the cement and asphalt of the modern world. Worlds collided, changing gradually yet constantly, unperceived until an alarm was signaled, getting our rapt attention.

Vision and perception change as we change. Things that seemed so large in your eyes as a youth are, to your amazement, not really that big once your eyes have become seasoned with age-filled experiences. True of what is real and what is imagined. Perspective is everything in overcoming obstacles and vanquishing our giants. So it was with the house in which we lived. It seemed spacious as a child, yet when I would return to it as a young adult, my vision changed. A trifle shocked, I considered how miniscule it looked, especially compared to the other houses that lined the street. It appeared dwarfed, fatigued, and uncomfortably situated. My memory had an unkind miscarriage of reality played upon it. Such a small place to house significant impacts. Yet some memories of a path remain indelibly accurate.

Kids who walked the same streets from kindergarten through high school started on our paths as friends and acquaintances in that neighborhood. It was a culture only we