BANG! “Sean!” screamed my Little League baseball coach, “You’re on deck!” The sound of a bat being violently hit against a metal fence woke me from my day dream.

“Huh?” I mumbled.

“You’re batting up next,” whispered a boy sitting next to me.
It was late July, and I was eight years old. I had just moved to Madison in the beginning of the year, and I was grateful about how nice everyone was to me, but at the same time I had missed my old friends from New Jersey.
While I was waiting to get up to bat, I saw my neighbor’s car pull into the driveway next to the field. Confused and impatient, I tried to make the person who was batting hurry up because I thought my neighbor was here to pick me up. She ran up to the field quickly, I was wondering why she was in such a hurry, so I tried to talk to her but she just ran up to me ignoring what I was saying. And surprisingly she was in tears while she told me my house was on fire. At first I was too stunned to actually have any reaction at all, but she told me to come into her car.
On the way to my house I was thinking to myself, it’s probably not that bad, maybe the oven burnt something or a candle fell over and started a small fire. You wouldn’t believe how wrong I was.
As Mrs. Dines (my neighbor) drove me toward my house, I saw the smoke and thought, this is much worse than I expected. This is when everything went blank for me. I had no expression, no emotion, and no thoughts. I just sat in the backseat of the car and stared at the smoke.

Then it came into view.
The top half of my house was engulfed in flames. Firemen were spraying water all over the fire, but it was too overpowering. As I was watching the bottom half of my house being overwhelmed by a huge inferno a thought popped into my head. Bailey. My 11 year old dog that was home when the fire happened. I looked to my left and my right but she was nowhere to be seen. I started panicking and asking the firemen where my dog was, and they all just said that they were trying to find her and that they would do their best. The feeling of the scorching heat on my face, the smell of smoke and the brackish taste of my own tears was all too much for me and I just waited. I waited for all of it to be over. Looking straight at the fire hoping it would stop for almost an hour.
Finally, I saw my dog emerge from the smoky scene and she ran up to me. I was overjoyed to see her okay and know that everyone was safe. After the fire my life was never the same. I had finally appreciated how generous everyone was in Madison. The church and school I went to had both raised money for my family, without us even asking. The school had even set up a program where other families had provided us dinners because we were living in a hotel for seven weeks. All the people who had donated money were like heroes to me at that time in my life. I am still amazed that people I had never even met before were giving away money and food to my family and I. When I was out of the hotel my family and I moved into a house just down the street from the destroyed house, so we could check on how the reconstruction is going. I was still having trouble with loss, because everything I had ever had, was gone. With no warning, out of nowhere everything. Gone. This whole experience made me learn a very important life lesson. And that is never take anything for granted, because it can disappear in the blink of an eye, because when it’s gone, you’re unquestionably going to regret it.