Wrapped in Fire

Written by: Avery Welch 

92-year-old Ann Tiffin Cowden stood with feet glued to the floor, watching unforgiving flames lick up the walls and crawl down the hall towards her.

“You either get out, or I’m gonna throw you over my shoulders and carry you down the dadgum stairs, so you better start walkin’,” said her grandson, Sanford Greer.

It didn’t take long for the reality to sink in: There was no stopping this fire.

Ann quickly grabbed her coat and headed to the door. Outside, they watched their life’s belongings flutter up into the night sky and get carried away by the island wind. It took firefighters 15 minutes to show up, and it wasn’t but five minutes after they arrived that the house caved in.

The night of Saturday, January 20th, Ann’s bright home on Dauphin Island, Alabama, turned to sullen ash. The sight holds many lost relics: Silver and gold jewelry, a black teak piano with ivory keys, a Bombay chest filled with family Bibles, hand-sewn gowns.

With all possessions lost, neighbors and island residents stepped in without hesitation to help Ann and her family.

The morning after the fire at Ann’s church, St. Francis Episcopal, members immediately began passing around baskets, filling them to the brim with checks.

“Judith had said, ‘We just need to make a quilt and wrap her in our love,’” Jean Clark said. “Two people turned to me then, and from there, we began working on it.”

The Remains

A month after the fire, I visited the remains. I remained silent upon arrival, for the sight was too bleak, the scent too pungent.

Yellow caution tape hung between the charred wooden posts, but I ducked under and ventured into the black soot. I snapped pictures of burnt up records, picture frames and the still-standing skeletons of vintage cars. Somewhere beneath my weight, memories laid to rest.

The next morning, I knocked on the glass door of Ann’s temporary home, glancing down at my shoes still stained with black ash. The door opened and revealed Ann hunched over her pink floral walker.

We sat in the sunroom chairs looking out at the bay. Ann spoke as if we were long lost friends, telling me about her past homes on Dauphin Island and how she loved watching white pelicans on the dock outside. Her thoughts would jump from past to present, arbitrarily landing on the day of the fire.

“It started with wanting to go to the parade,” Ann said. The southern twang in her voice gave away her roots: Mobile, Alabama.

On the second morning of the Dauphin Island Mardi Gras parade, Ann stood at her front door bundled in cold weather clothes ready to watch the floats roll by.

Bitterness hung in the air that day, though. The cold incessant wind crept into every crevice, seeped into every bone, and ineluctably kept Ann at home.

Disappointed yet slightly relieved to stay out of the cold, she spent the afternoon in a slumber on the couch– the last slumber in that house.

Chaos erupted as her daughter came running out of her room yelling, “FIRE!”

“All I heard was commotion,” Ann said.

Wooden TV trays crashed to the floor as Sanford rushed by to retrieve the hose from outside. The hose, however, expelled no water, for the line had been turned off due to freezing weather, and the fire had already burned through it.

Sanford then tried the fire extinguisher, but it was expired and lasted no more than five seconds. Meanwhile, Ann frantically called for her dog.

Ann received Jingle, her Chihuahua, as a gift from her daughter two days before Christmas one year. The scruffy black and white dog followed her everywhere, but on the night he needed to be near, he was nowhere to be found.

“I don’t know if he was already overcome, whether he’d been scared when those tables knocked over,” Ann said. “He could have gone back to my room and found something soft on the floor and fell asleep.”

Ann’s gaze remained locked outside the window on the dock as her thoughts rambled on, playing out scenarios that explained where he could have been.

Jingle never made it out of the house. Somewhere in the roar of the flames, his bell was silenced.

“All I could say watching it was, ‘Thank you, dear Lord, that he’s not suffering; he’s gone,” Ann said.

Across the room, Sanford pitched in. “Now the neighbor across the street wanted to go back in, and he’s like ‘You got a dog in there?’ I said, ‘Yeah. It’s sitting right next to two oxygen tanks- I don’t think I’m going to let you back in there,” Sanford said.

The January before, Ann had pneumonia. When the hospital became overcrowded, the doctor sent her home with two-cylinder oxygen tanks and an oxygen compressor. Those tanks rested in the house after she healed, collecting dust through time.

All at once, the fire had shot into the air and began to spread faster. Prospectors said generators caused the burst of flames. “But it wasn’t generators. It was my oxygen exploding,” Ann said.

The initial cause of the fire remains unknown.

The Quilt

For weeks after the fire, island locals worked to support Ann and her family. They made shopping trips to replenish her wardrobe and sent in donations of money and food.

Among the gifts, they received white wicker baskets full of goods. “And you know what was in mine? Yellow writing tablets with pens and pencils” Ann said. “It’s just amazing what people have thought of and what I would not have known I'd miss.”

Members of St. Francis Episcopal continued to send in personalized squares to be sewn into the quilt. One square, painted by Ralph Rhodes, shows the serene scene of a white pelican on a dock.

The purple, green and yellow quilt was blessed by the Rev. Roger Porter and presented to Ann on Easter along with a great sum of more than $10,000.

The fire that night stripped Ann and her family from all earthly possessions, but the people of the island have wrapped them in the warmth of their love and the warmth of their faith.