Fire in the Neighborhood

During the night last night I was awoken by a disturbance. I could see flashing lights out front so I got up to see what was going on. There was a police car parked in the intersection directing traffic away from the fifteen hundred block of Seventh Avenue. I opened the door and saw a bunch of fire trucks only half a block away. I put a jacket over my warm robe and found a pair of shoes and went out to see which house was ablaze. There are very old houses in my neighborhood and two of them had flames high over the roof. These houses are VERY close together and there was no way only one of them could burn. The young men who worked on our stone wall this summer live in one of them, and I heard one say that the fire started in the attic. While I was standing there gawking I heard Audrey yell for me. She and Jason were standing across the street, and Pam was there with Shana, Jonathan's girlfriend. It seems we all meet in the street like that far too often. In just a few minutes I was freezing so I went home. Richard was sitting in the living room and asked what was going on. I just went back to bed - I had taken Ambien a couple of hours before that. We drove past the houses this morning and the second story of each was really burned. We have lost many, many houses in this neighborhood to fire.