Memories in the ashes

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, May 20th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Next up on The World and Everything in It: losing a place to call home.

Communities in South Georgia are working to piece life back together after wildfires last month destroyed the greatest number of homes in the state’s history, about 120.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy paid a visit to one of the families affected.

MARY MUNCY: Every December, when brothers Austin and Ashley Delouch were young, they cut a pine tree down and brought it to their mother for a Christmas tree. 

But one year, Ashley says they branched out.

ASHELY: This particular Christmas, I don't know what year, but we got mama a cedar tree, about five feet high, six feet high, and carried it in that front room, and she put it by the fireplace, and that was a Christmas tree.

All of the relatives came and stacked presents a few feet high under it. At night, they dragged mattresses to wherever there was room, leaving most of the floor full of sleeping cousins.

ASHELY: And Mama liked to cook. She cooked for 50 as quick as she would five.

After Christmas, she planted the tree by the porch. For years, the tree provided shade for the family. Now, it’s blackened and bare.

Austin points to a swath of brown pine trees to the south.

AUSTIN: And the fire was coming right, right, right through the right side, right, right yonder, to the right. See that gap in yonder? About a mile in there you can see it way above the trees. It was 40 feet high, about a mile off when we left.

The brothers split their childhood between this house and a newer one a few hundred yards away. Austin’s grandfather built the older house in the 1920s. They call the property the “Home Place.” 

Ashley and Austin moved away after high school and built their own families. But they kept coming back for their mother's big family meals.

AUSTIN: They didn't have a bunch financially, very little to tell you the truth, either one of them. But they had a lot of love for the family, and mother loved to cook.

The houses are surrounded by farm land and pine trees. No one has lived in either house for years, but the brothers still come here regularly—including when the fires broke out.

AUSTIN: We put a sprinkler up here on top of this house. And then Ashley boy, we went down there and mowed some.

The fire department sent firefighters and tankers. The brothers stayed until about 12:30 in the morning.

Austin thinks the tanker saved the newer house. But 45 minutes after the brothers left, they learned their grandfather’s house had burned.

AUSTIN: It was an A-frame house, set like this, and then on the back end of it was a kitchen…

Now, it’s a pile of twisted sheet metal with two brick chimneys sticking up on either side.

Ashley and Austin walk past the frames of a mule-drawn plow and a tractor. After Ashley got the call that the house had burned, he tried to go to bed.

ASHLEY: I didn't cry, really, at the time. Tried not to, but I couldn't keep from thinking of one story after another after another till about five o'clock in the morning, just like we'd been talking. When one got to the end, I'd think about another, and I prayed, I prayed to the Lord to stop me from thinking about anything. And finally, about five o'clock, He heard me, I reckon, and I got some sleep.

They may not live in or visit the Home Place as much anymore. But it held family history.

The brothers hope to keep their memories alive and maybe create a new Home Place.

AUSTIN: I've been all the way around the gamut, what you could do, get mad and this, that, and the other, the aggravated, this, that, and other. But I finally put it in the Lord's hands and thanked Him for it, all the time we had it. And, you know, thankful for the memories, you know? We got a bunch of 'em.

The fires that took the house—and more than 100 others—are almost completely contained now, but they’ll likely keep smoldering until there’s a big rain. 

The next step for the family is to start slowly cleaning up.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy in Clinch County, Georgia.

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