After fire destroyed their home in June, this Licking Valley family is working to rebuild

MARY ANN TOWNSHIP – Recently Melissa Keith has unwittingly gained a keen awareness of the “little things:” The keychains and knickknacks and mementos of passing through life; things that are not always valuable, but when your world has been stripped away, whose absence makes you realize how little with which you’ve been left.

In the early morning hours of June 23, Keith — who until that day shared a home with her mother, Daisy Estep, owner of downtown Newark’s Daisy’s Diner; daughters, Ali, 15, and Amanda; and Amanda’s daughter, Grace, 11 — awoke to the sound of Estep’s exclamations about a fire.

Just before 5 a.m., Estep’s small black Pomeranian began barking an alert as flames suspected to have originated from ashes in a nearby trash can erupted onto the family’s front porch. Facing a wall of fire, Estep yelled for the others to help and grab a fire extinguisher, but before they could act, flames consumed the front wall of the home, and smoke began pouring through the windows, setting off the fire alarms.

All five occupants and three of their four dogs escaped through the back door; Keith, realizing a fourth dog was unaccounted for, climbed through a window to get back inside. Hurriedly she shoved the 75-pound Labrador named Rosie out the window and fled, grabbing a safe, keys and a box of important papers as she went.

Outside, from a safe distance, Ali called 911 as Keith moved the cars away from their burning home. Then she called a neighbor.

“I said, ‘Could you come over here and get the kids and the dogs and take them to your house?’” Keith recalled. “Because I didn't want them sitting there watching the house burn down.”

The house was declared a total loss, and Keith now finds herself in the place of tackling one battle at a time: Working with insurance to find a place to stay (they are living in cramped quarters with another of Keith’s grown daughters); replacing lost documents and information; exploring possibilities for demolishing the ruins of their old house north of Hanover in order to make room for a new one.

This is to say nothing of the smaller battles, like finding a shirt to wear.

“My granddaughter said to me, ‘Why haven't you got yourself some clothes?’” said Keith, who asked her adult son for a few things to borrow. “I said, ‘Grace, I've been trying to get you and Ali and your mom and grandma's stuff taken care of. I haven't had a chance to do stuff for myself yet.

“And she said, ‘Well, you need to get yourself some clothes.’ I'm like, ‘Maybe, but there's only so much time in the day.’”

Thanks to community support, the family secured clothing and food gift card donations; Keith’s workplace, John Hinderer Honda, set up a GoFundMe page that allows people to make financial contributions to help the family get back on its feet.

Still, they have a long road ahead.

“It's just a lot. I mean, I guess that's the process, trying to find some normalcy once we can get into someplace,” Keith said.

As they work to find their footing, the family is taking one day at a time.

Several days after the fire, they stopped by the property and picked through the ashes. It was hard to acknowledge the treasures that were lost or damaged beyond repair — Estep’s wedding dress; American Girl dolls and a custom-built house that went with them; nearly all of their belongings and clothes.

Recovered were some pieces of jewelry belonging to Melissa and Ali, as well as Melissa’s baby boots, found in a trunk that had been in Estep’s room, along with some old photos.

The family is thankful for their lives and their pets’ lives, and as they work to rebuild, they’re using humor to stay positive, Keith said.

It works somewhat, but they know they’ll walk through grief in the process — grieving the big things and the small.

“The little things that you get all through the years that you're like, ‘Oh, this is cute. I'm keeping this. This is mine,’” Keith reflected, thinking of Ali and Grace. “They don't have anything like that. You know what I mean? You don't even think about, like, Ali’s stickers on her water bottle — we don't have water bottles.

“None of those things … Jibbitz for Crocs. It's all the weird little things that you don't think about. You know what I mean?”

To contribute to the GoFundMe for Melissa and her family, visit gofund.me/15ddf86d.