Crash Landing January 30, 1981
"You better come look," my husband said, pointing at a widening cloud of black smoke in the sky.
I made my way to the porch, pushing aside the green garbage bags that held everything we owned. We were moving from the sagging two-decker on Hanover Street to Mariner's Village where we would havE; a yard, a neighborhood school for our new son, proximity to my friend Jan and her boys, and a rent we could afford.
Just then the phone rang.
"Something happened in the village," Jan said, calling from a pay phone, "We can't go home yet. Could we wait at your house?"
That big cloud over our new neighborhood could not be good news. We pieced together what had happened from the radio.
An FB-11 lA airplane out of Pease Air Force Base had crashed in the woods near our new house just as the neighborhood school was being let out. School kids were safe, we learned, but a house across from our home-to-be was in flames from jet fuel pluming over the rooftops of the wooden houses on Circuit Road.
The local TV station carried dramatic footage of our neighbor being interviewed at work in Seabrook Station tearfully describing his wife rushing back into the building to get her elderly mother and children out.
The next day, our move-in day, military personnel with guns and dogs swarmed our new yard as we hauled bag after bag from the car trunk. Our corner had been saved by a handful of minutes, a few hundred feet. There had been no fatalities, no nuclear weapons on board.
"It could've been so much worse," everyone said.
The narrow miss on the school bus had everyone in the neighborhood giddy with relief, even the family whose house burned.
We finished moving our stuff in and ordered a couple of kegs to set up on the lawn to share.
"It's a good omen!" I shouted to my father on the phone over the hubbub of the pop-up party on our new front lawn, everyone wrapped up in winter coats, hats and gloves toasting each other as dozens of children ran around.
Our only son would have plenty of company, I thought, smiling. We were safe, we were housed, we were home.