Over the last few weeks there have been a few small fires, on the side of the main road near where we live. A fire bug, is the general consensus. Yesterday’s fire came within three hundred metres of our home. We are very grateful for the local and rural fire brigade volunteers who attended the fire and put it out before it could get any closer to the houses in our street and the others nearby.

While we were watching the fire, I thought about our emergency action plan. Do you have one? Do you have a swag packed, with things like batteries, torches, a first aid kit, bottles of water, toiletries, some clothes, special or precious memorabilia like photographs, and all your important documents?

You could argue that we don’t need to pack an emergency kit in 2023. That everything you need is readily available to buy and that our photographs and documents are all electronic and stored on our computers, laptops, even our mobile phones, or in the cloud. I went through the list in my head. Insurance documents – email, utilities bills – email, car rego papers – email. I have a folder with all our certificates – birth, divorce, marriage, and copies of our wills and our passports are now in that folder, somewhere where I would remember to pick it up if we needed to leave in a hurry. What about paperwork for our home – the deed or formal papers or whatever that is called nowadays? Also any scripts or medication? It is something to think about, in case we were ever faced with having to leave in a hurry.

Household items such as food, toiletries, furniture, clothes, they can all be replaced. Even our garden can be recreated. As long as we are safe, and any pets we have are safe.

It would be sad to lose all the family history information that I have; the old documents, certificates and photographs, that aren’t on any computer. Some of these are evidence of our family arriving in Australia with the first fleet of ships. In reality though, the interest in these pieces of historical significance probably ends with me. I only look at them once every few years, but they are part of my family’s story. It is the same with the drawings and artwork my children created so many years ago, and school photographs of them from 1997 to 2015.

I have so many photographs of my children when they were little, they fill several albums. Earlier this year I found some cute much smaller albums and filled them with leftover photographs. When I put together these albums, I was thinking that if we ever decided to seriously downsize, and travel off on some adventure, these are much easier to keep and carry around. These albums are just the right size to pop into an emergency evacuation bag.

Yesterday’s event got me thinking, seeing as we are only into the second month of spring and the fires are cropping up everywhere. It is so dry, with no significant rain for months. We can all get complacent, thinking that it won’t happen to us. Fingers and toes crossed it never does. But if it did, would you be prepared? It is one thing to choose to downsize, but it can be devastating if we aren’t prepared. I think I would be okay, if the worst should happen and we find ourselves having to start from scratch. Because I have already thought about downsizing, and because now I have a plan should a fire start closer to our home. It is certainly something to think about.