4TH FOLDER, 4TH FILE (PICTURE).

I decided to play along, and much to my disappointment, it was a picture of this. :(

This was taken in August 2006, when a fire broke out in my neighborhood hardware store. What was weird was I woke up in the middle of the night to a house full of smoke. Not having air conditioning, all my windows are open at night, as well as the porch sliders, being that it was August and hot as can be. Needless to say, I was scared to death, thinking it was my house (lesson learned: batteries in smoke alarms were dead). After a quick run through the house (which took about 45 seconds), I realized it was not my house so figured it might be one of the neighbors' houses. I attempted to look out the back of the house through the sliders, but the smoke was so thick I could not see anything. When I went to the front of the house, the smoke was so thick I could hardly make out the street lights directly in front of the house. Stepping outside onto the porch, I could hear muted sounds coming from down the block, and could see people all along the street outside. It was surreal, like how you would observe in a dream. A short walk down the street and I learned what had happened. Weird how I can remember it like it was last week.

The smell of smoke hung over the area for a few days, something I noticed the next day and the next on my runs through the neighborhood. And of course the fire was a huge loss to the owner and the neighborhood. Two other businesses, a grocery store and our ice cream shop, were damaged as well. The good news, however, was that they all reopened a few months later. The bad news is that the grocery store eventually went out of business a year later.