Betta Fish Accessories

When you first realize that your home is on fire, you panic. You aren't thinking clearly. At least I did. I was 13 at the time.

Our fire started in the basement and was caused by mixing aluminum and copper wiring during a recent remodeling job on our house. This all took place back in the '70's.

The smoke became noticable from underneith the door leading downstairs into the cellar. I remember being told by my Grandmother, who lived with us, to go and tell Daddy that the house was on fire. That's when the panic started. I ran up to the second floor of our home, told my parents, and we all started grabbing the younger children and pets to get them outside.

We had quite a few pets including a bird and a snake which my father had to go back into the house for.

With everyone safe, we ran to the neighbor's house to call the fire department and then sat outside on the curb and watched the fire grow until it was billowing out of the second story windows.

The firemen were great but the fire damage was quite severe anyway.

We spent the night with friends and didn't return to the house until it was deemed safe.

The structure of our home remained after the fire but most of the contents were beyond saving. We lost many precious things that can never be replaced including all of our baby photographs.

While some of the rooms of our home were untouched, others were burned beyond recognition. I'll never forget the sight of my baby brother's burnt crib, or our kitchen telephone melted so badly that it now ran about 3 feet down the wall.

The thing I found most strange, after the fire, was that the clothing we gathered that looked only to be smoke damaged and dirty, completely disintegrated when we tried to wash it. The thread just disappeared and all that was left was a washing machine full of pieces of cloth.

When we found my sister's Betta fish floating in his fish bowl I cried. In the rushed panic, we had all completely forgotten him.

To this day, although I thank God that my family survived, I still feel badly about that silly Betta.

I made this lens to help the non-human victims of the Southern California Fires as a memorial to our lost Betta fish, Fishy-Fishy.

(Stop laughing, my sister was only 3 at the time. Fishy-Fishy was a good name.)

All profit from this lens is being donated to The Humane Society by way of SquidAid at Squidoo.
SquidAid helps those in need after a natural disater such as the most recent Southern California Fires.

Please do all that you can to help.

SquidAid Squidoodle designed by and appears here courtesy of:
© 2007 LensDoc (Kirsti A. Dyer). Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.