WEST PARIS — Wearing donated clothing, three young boys giggled as they kicked a deflated basketball around the soot-covered yard, skirting the edges of the farmhouse razed to just a water-filled basement.
Dumbfounded, bleary-eyed and trying to make sense of the surreal, homeowner Donald Hodgkin stared at the ruins of his house, whose doors he unhesitatingly opened to 21 friends and family, and shook his head.
“What a mess,” Hodgkin said.
The boys stopped playing for a moment and looked over the side of the brick-and-stone foundation, as their father laid a plank to tiptoe across the flooded basement to retrieve waterlogged possessions.
Around midnight on Saturday, Hodgkin’s son, Stephen Dehetre, grew alarmed after smoke began billowing out of a bedroom window.
Concerned, he woke the dozen people sleeping in the home at the time. Everyone got outside safely, but there was no time to grab anything. The fire — later dubbed a “wildfire” by the fire chief — spread into the attic and consumed the home in a matter of moments.
They did not have insurance.
Firefighters later confirmed the fire started after an improperly installed pellet boiler ignited the home’s siding.
Gone with the fire was the sole home for five families and multiple generations, including 11 school-age children and an infant, along with three dogs and a rabbit, which perished in the blaze.
For the past 11 years Hodgkin’s rural, two-story home on Ellingwood Road, a backwoods thoroughfare on the outskirts of Paris Hill, has opened its doors to the poor and homeless who couldn’t catch a break — people who, like Hodgkin, have battled poverty and health issues.
Unable to bear turning away those in need, the house grew with the occupants over the years. New additions were affixed as new families — mostly sons and their children or close friends with families — moved in after their lives took a turn for the worst.
A week before, Hodgkin had taken in a Vermont couple and their baby after they became homeless.
Everyone had their own rooms, sometimes just a wall erected within a former bedroom. The rooms weren’t the largest, but afforded privacy.
The worst thing was the line for the bathroom.
“It was never boring,” Hodgkin said.
The family is hoping donations for basic survival goods like toiletries, food and lodging will come through. The Red Cross has secured just three nights for them at a local motel
In the long run, Hodgkin said he’s looking for lumber and the tools to rebuild before the snow flies, though he admits some of obstacles — like receiving approval from the town and paying for the construction — abound.
He recalled briefly sharing a small trailer with 26 other people while living in Woodstock.
“You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Longtime friend Melissa Heath said that’s just the kind of person he is.
“If you knocked on the door and needed a place, he’d let you stay,” Heath said.
A small, steady stream of cars passes by the home as Hodgkin talks. Curious onlookers wave or stop to talk. Many of them come to see if anything’s needed. Fourteen boxes of pizza were dropped off by two local pizza places, which brings a smile to Hodgkin’s face.
Marrisa Winningham, a family friend living down the road, said it’s time for the charity to be reciprocated.
“This was a safe place for a lot of people — now it’s gone,” Winningham said.
She holds up a photo of 4-year-old Cole Dehetre, taken the day before, covered in soot and beaming.
“Why wouldn’t he be smiling? The whole family is here.”
As she watched her father a few yards away, Hodgkin’s daughter, Kayla Decoteau-Hodgkin, who was drilling for the Army National Guard when friends texted her father’s home was ablaze, shakes her head slightly.
Then she beams.
“I don’t know how he does it. He’d give his last dollar to a complete stranger,” she said.
Growing up with four brothers, she said her childhood was tough, but fun and loving.
Like her father, resolution fills her voice. The family will rebuild — together.
“Stop in when we get it up again — it’ll be a madhouse.”
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