I got a true sock in the heart today from NewsBreak of all places. An alert let me know that the Lexington Fire Department had gotten a house fire under control in 45 minutes.

But when I saw the name of the street, my heart went cold. I didn’t have to see the address, I knew that house, knew that photo. It was my beloved grandparent’s home, where they had lived from the time my mother was in high school until several years after my grandmother’s death. My granddad sold it three years before his own death. It was the house of my childhood, just two blocks from my parent’s home and a place that had held thousands of childhood memories.

I can even remember the way their house smelled, like clean laundry and fresh-baked pound cake, even when my grandmother wasn’t cooking. Everything was always neat, orderly, and my grandmother had an incredible sense of style and design.

I remember planning performances with my first cousins and a next-door neighbor that we now have on 8mm film and DVD, in which we all sang or danced for the adults. For several years, we performed on the screened-in side porch, until my grandmother decided to close it in. But one end remained a wall of glass where she could grow plants and look out at the beautiful back yard.

The yard initially went downhill from the house, but grandaddy had a portion of it leveled off just behind the house so there was a place for a walkway around to the other side from the back “stoop” porch. That porch was raised because under the kitchen there was a garage and basement where my grandmother put the laundry and grandad had all of his tools. The garage was tiny, barely wide enough for a car, and grandad parked on the street by the garage door.

The front yard had the most wonderful trees, though most are now gone, and fat, healthy, beautifully green boxwoods surrounded the front and street side of the house. A small, fenced in grassy area was outside the front door and the side door that led to the porch and then the garden room. My grandmother had the greenest of thumbs and there were always flowers on that side of the house, including massive hydrangeas.

Most of that has been gone for years, but I still see that front yard in my mind’s eye.

I also see the backyard as it sloped down hill, with a magnolia tree that was just made for climbing, and sitting and hiding to read a book on a hot summer afternoon. There was the white birch tree with a double trunk that I used to sit under, and when I was young, the sand box we played in. There was my grandmother’s vegetable patch, and the strong metal chairs we’d sit in that would rock slightly that they don’t make anymore. It was fenced in with chain link that you didn’t see because vines and flowers grew over the fencing, and for years, my grandad’s boat sat in the lower part of the yard during the “off season.”

Inside, the kitchen was the heart of my immensely talented grandmother’s home, where she crafted dishes intuitively, and shared that talent with me. There was a cozy den, where grandad would watch the ball game and my grandmother would read the newspaper (she was always my biggest fan).

Upstairs were two bedrooms, and the one that became the “guest” room was also my grandmother’s sewing room. I swear she could make clothing fit for royalty.

I know it was “just a house,” and I know my family hadn’t lived there in 20 years, and I know I have no right to be upset about its loss. But I am. I’m angry that someone would leave a house, that was once a home filled with love and memories, to be abandoned. I’m sad that someone likely took shelter inside and likely caused the fire, though the fire marshal has not said that. I’m angry and sad that I did not know the owners didn’t want it anymore, because had I known, I’d have moved heaven and earth to reclaim it.

I’ve worked hard to accept, and have mostly succeeded, that “things” are just that — stuff. But this house was the one place in my childhood that I felt loved completely and unconditionally, where so many of my best memories were made, and where my grandparents still live in my memory. There is no separating them from that home.

And so this small piece of me is gone, and I am grieving it, and just like a person, I am angry because I feel like I could have saved it, could have stopped it had I only known.

I’ll move on eventually but for now, I’m going to take some walks down memory lane and visit two people I will always cherish, and the house that they made a home.

Elisabeth Strillacci covers crime, courts, Spencer, East Spencer and Kannapolis for the Salisbury Post.