She never stopped running. It seemed that fire chased her all her life. In the chaos and confusion of escape, the Mylons were separated from one of their children, Mary's younger brother. For two days they didn't know if he was alive or dead. They feared the worst. But then he was discovered in a shelter and joyously reunited with the clan.
But everything the family had was gone.
Mary married young. Both she and Earl Corey were in their teens when they wed. He was an ambitious young man who built his own business in El Cerrito, California. They lived in the same building the business was housed in. And then the fire came again. For the second time in her life, Mary Mylon Corey lost everything she had to the flames.
Later, it seemed, the fire took her marriage too. The strain eventually took its toll and the Corey marriage ended in divorce, after three sons and a daughter, my mother, were born.
It was a day when divorce carried a stigma. Mary was crushed and never fully recovered from the blow. She never remarried, and carried bitterness throughout much of her life. She lived in our home the majority of the time after the divorce, until her death.
Her life was tragic in many ways, and I heard her recount the story of the Great Earthquake and Fire hundreds of times. She kept coming back to it. It seems it never let her go. But I saw her commit her life to Jesus and I knew she loved the Lord.
When she slipped into the Lord's presence those many years ago, finally the fire was gone ... forever. And she had a home that would never be taken from her.
Postscript:
After I posted this, a Twitter friend informed me that, ironically, a 3.8 earthquake rattled the City today. The epicenter was near Pacifica, where Peggy and I used to live. The San Jose Mercury News reported:
On the 105th anniversary of the giant 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the San Andreas fault woke up with a small shrug.
A 3.41 [later changed to 3.8] magnitude quake was reported at 2:57 p.m. on Monday afternoon, with an epicenter 8.5 miles deep located halfway between Millbrae and Pacifica, near the north end of Crystal Springs Reservoir, according to U.S. Geological Survey spokesman Paul Laustsen. The tremor was felt from San Jose to Oakland.
At 5:12 a.m. April 18, 1906, San Franciscans were jarred awake by a massive magnitude 7.9 earthquake, which caused buildings to crumble and killed an estimated 3,000 people, according to recent updated calculations by USGS.
