Brenda Wyatt sought a quiet spot by a pond at Owens Community College and waited out the hour as the sun went down. Moments earlier, she had learned that her house on the river burned to the ground, reducing her life's work to a pile of cinders.

"I was just trying to keep my head from blowing up," she said.

At 8 p.m., she would go to class, dismiss her Composition I students, and drive her 15-year-old mini-pickup to the smoldering pit on Broadway in South Toledo that had been home to eight women and eight men, ages 20 to 70.

"It was surreal," Ms. Wyatt said, about arriving at the scene of the intense fire seven weeks ago.

The archive of 3,000 feminist books and magazines she had built over decades was devoured in minutes by an inferno fueled by a hot southwesterly wind racing downriver. Gone were the chamomile, feverfew, chickweed, and echinacea she grew on the terrace for her herbal-products business. Gone were her three beloved cats.

Tall with a thick, brown braid, Ms. Wyatt, 57, cobbles together three part-time jobs to make ends meet. But the upper flat she rented on Broadway Street on a bluff overlooking the Maumee River was a bit of paradise, a rare stretch of urban nature where folks on a beer budget drank in a champagne view.

"This is not the first adversity in my life," she said, "just the most devastating one."

On Sept. 6, as the nation focused on the Gulf Coast disaster, volunteers helped 126 survivors of Hurricane Katrina settle into temporary and permanent homes in the Toledo area.

The same day, 16 Toledoans experienced their own personal disaster as they watched in horror while most of their worldly belongings were destroyed in the fire that quickly consumed six old, wooden homes on skinny lots in the 2400 block of Broadway. The toll included seven cats and a dog, years of research by a controversial activist, countless family photographs, original artwork, antiques, and recordings of deceased parents' voices.

There was a pair of Converse All-Stars worn, with attitude, by a young soldier in Vietnam and at his wedding after he came home from war. A wall hanging from a visit with the Dalai Lama. A wooden canoe. Fishing tackle. The cremated ashes of an adored father and a baby grand piano. A great-grandmother's silk handkerchief. Hundreds of CDs and three acoustic guitars owned by a trio of young friends who had moved in a month earlier.

Two owners and 14 renters lived in five of the homes, built in 1897 and 1902 when the new trolley line stretched from downtown to one of the city's favorite attractions: Walbridge Park. The sixth home was vacant.

For hours that day, many who lived there were transfixed at the scene, stunned and disbelieving. The inevitable throng a big fire attracts sometimes cheered. Columns of water shot from cannons. It was a tough fire to tame. Firefighters dragged hoses through front doors of homes and out the back, trying to douse the river side. Early on, the wind shifted, taking the fire with it, causing $8,000 in damage to a ladder truck and five pumping engines.

At the end of the day, all that stood were tall brick chimneys shrouded in smoke.

When night fell and they'd had enough of heat and smoke and drama, 16 newly homeless people sought refuge.

Ms. Wyatt went to her son's and daughter-in-law's peaceful home in Waterville, where she remains, undecided about where to go next. Her landlady, Sue Crawford, who lived downstairs, went to her 88-year-old grandmother's nearby. Ms. Crawford had owned her home since 1983; it had been in her family for more than 70 years.

"Why this happened, I don't know," said Ms. Crawford, 50, who works at Sun Oil Co.'s refinery. "I'm not a churchgoer, but I'm very spiritual, and I have a lot of people praying for me. And I can feel it."

Matt Wagner, 22, a cook, had lived next door with two friends for just a month. His boss at Outback Steakhouse tapped into a corporate foundation to help him. For the next month, Mr. Wagner and one of his friends slept on the couch and the floor of his sister's studio apartment in Maumee.

Terry Burns, 57, a customer service employee at Paramount Health Care, stayed at his 84-year-old mother's West Toledo home. He salvaged two plastic deck chairs and a grill. He has since moved into a riverfront apartment down the street from the fire.

One woman stayed with her brother, a few stayed with boyfriends or girlfriends.

Dawn Hairabedian, 41, and her fiance, Robert Gildemeister, 52, stayed in a little camper behind her sister's house in Temperance for several weeks. Her son, Anthony Hairabe-dian, 20, moved in with friends. All three are settling in to a new home in a duplex on the river near the site of the fire.

Forty-seven days later, each of the victims continues to grasp, in small pieces, the overwhelming reality that all they owned has disappeared.

"I don't know if it will ever sink in," said an exhausted Brenda Johnson. She'll plan to get a photograph to show a co-worker, or to cook the pork chops in the freezer, and then remember she has nothing.

Like most of her neighbors, Ms. Johnson, was uninsured. Now in a sparsely furnished duplex, the interim clerk in code enforcement for the city of Toledo has been turned down for renter's insurance because of the fire.

"It's very sad. I miss my pets," she said, referring to her cats. She misses her cookbooks and family pictures dating to the 1800s. She regrets she didn't transfer onto discs tape recordings of church services at which her minister father delivered sermons and her mother sang and played guitar.

Ms. Johnson, 53, who drives a 1992 Buick on its last legs, is overwhelmed. "I've got all these things I have to do. I'm not moving quickly. I guess I still feel like I'm in a fog."

As the inferno raged, melting windshields, lights on emergency vehicles, and even a fire truck's tire, the Red Cross opened for business down the street in an air-conditioned TARTA bus. It served refreshments to firefighters and gave victims cash cards worth about $350 for food, shelter, and clothing.

When the shock for people who have lost a home wears off, the long, hard process of creating a "new normal" begins. It's similar to rebuilding a life after the death of a loved one, said Karen Durniat-Suehrstedt, a Red Cross volunteer who cared for some of the thousands who poured into the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, La., after Hurricane Katrina.

"What we struggle with when people die and when houses burn is that emotional attachment to the person, to the setting, to the things," she said. "They have to acknowledge what's happened, grieve the loss, and create a new relationship to the world."

People who suffer loss can expect to go through stages of disbelief, anger, grief, and despondency. They'll need patience to replace birth certificates, Social Security cards, vehicle titles, credit cards, and wills.

Ultimately, they need to acknowledge what was lost and find a way to step over it, said Ms. Durniat-Suehrstedt. And the ability to bounce back varies from person to person.

"I used to think of myself as fairly resilient. I don't feel very resilient," said Claudia Vercellotti, who rented the lower duplex where the fire is believed to have started. "This is our own hurricane."

She continues staying in a hotel with her boyfriend. As a self-employed researcher who does projects for a sociologist, she's been working out of a Kinko's store on a borrowed laptop.

"I feel like I'm a visitor," she said. "I haven't figured out where I'm going to land."

A few nights after the fire, she drove to the site and perched on a charred water heater, staring at the river until dawn broke over the far shore. She still goes back, to watch sunsets and try to make sense of it.

For four days, she and friends sifted through steaming rubble, searching for anything familiar. She found a few charred newspaper clippings and the pedals from her piano. She hoped to find her late father's cremated remains.

"It seems kind of indignant to end up in a landfill with garbage and diapers," she said.

Her apartment was full of family heirlooms, the bedroom set of her great-great-grandfather that she drove to Tennessee to pick up, hundreds of books, her mother's paintings. "I paid $600 a month for five-and-a-half years to ultimately incinerate everything I own."

Also lost were the extensive files she kept about her volunteer project. Ms. Vercellotti, 35, helped establish the Toledo chapter of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and has been a relentless critic of the Catholic Church's dealings with people who say they were victims.

The day of the fire, she left the home she rented from Byron Stanger at 1:30 p.m. for a doctor's appointment; 45 minutes later, fire trucks arrived at the scene.

Rumors spread almost as fast as the fire. A neighbor said he thought it started in Ms. Vercellotti's gas grill, but she said she hasn't used it in years. Some said they thought someone was doing electrical work in the four-apartment building, which is actually two old houses joined by a common stairway. Several questioned whether someone might have intended to punish her for her criticism of the church.

"Total strangers have stopped and asked me if I think it's arson. I can't wrap my brain around that," Ms. Vercellotti said, adding that she's probably little more than a "mild nuisance" to the Catholic diocese.

The Toledo Fire Department has ruled the cause as undetermined. It did not investigate because any evidence of arson - accelerants, wiring, burn patterns - would have been consumed by the flames.

No suspicious activity was reported before the daytime blaze, fire officials said.

"You can come up with all sorts of conspiracies. We're in the business of trying to determine fact," Deputy Fire Chief Bob Metzger said in a previous Blade story. "Nothing on that scene will identify what started that fire."

But Ms. Vercellotti's suspicions grew when, eight days later, the home of another SNAP volunteer in San Antonio burned to the ground, a fire for which the cause also is ruled undetermined.

Four days after the fire, the property owners received letters from the city informing them they had 72 hours to remove all debris. Three owners split the $8,000 cost to have their rubble hauled away and 100 tons of sand and dirt dumped into holes where basements had been.

They needed permits: a $100 demolition permit, $600 to kill the sewer and water taps, and $1,000 bonds (costing about $100) to protect curbs and sidewalks. And of every $15,000 they received in insurance, the city holds $2,000 in escrow until the site is clean.

"There's a lot of hoops to jump through, said Gordon Capshaw. "People who have no resources would lose their property over this."

Mr. Capshaw's house was the fifth to burn. He rented the lower floor to a tenant and upstairs stored architectural artifacts he'd bought at auctions, sales, and collected from sites he's worked at as a contractor. His residence is two doors from the fire. "I was totally under-insured," he said.

After buying the house in 1991 for $27,000 on a 35-foot lot that tumbles 160 feet to the river, Mr. Capshaw installed new heating and plumbing systems, dug out the basement, and built out the lower level. Remodeling the bottom unit, he used antique pedestals from a downtown restaurant as the base for a kitchen island topped with a wooden table from an old bowling alley.

"Everything was handcrafted," he said.

During the fire, he shot dozens of photographs. "Life will go on, but it's a lot to deal with."

The house of his next-door neighbor, Michael "Bruce" Gunkel, was the last to be swallowed by flames, which couldn't hop over the little parking lot to a seventh home.

"I lost one hell of a lot more than money down here. This was my raison d'etre," Mr. Gunkel said. The place he'd owned for 13 years represented a lifestyle change and hobby. It was a giant erector set for the retired stockbroker. "When I bought this place, I didn't know which end of a hammer to use ... I bought it, tore it all apart, put it back together."

Mr. Gunkel, 70, lived on the top floor and rented the middle and bottom units. He misses "dumb things," he said, such as his plants, his beer mug from Sigma Chi fraternity at Cornell University, and observing life on the river.

"I have a record of what birds I saw, different kinds of birds I never heard of. I had a little book, I looked them up," he said. "I could reach up and grab the geese as they flew by."

He wants to rebuild, but cash is a concern for him and for some of the property owners.

"I've been paying taxes since I was 15. I've been paying taxes for Florida when they got wiped out, for California when they got wiped out, for Mississippi when they wiped out. And now I'm wiped out," he said. "I have to get help. I can't rebuild at 10 percent money."

Recently, Mr. Gunkel and other owners and tenants met with Clinton Wallace, Toledo's chief building officer, at the site. Across the street, rock music blasted as roofers hammered plywood sheets onto a heat-damaged roof. The owners questioned Mr. Wallace - how should they deal with their antiquated sewers? Are their lots too narrow to rebuild? What do they do next?

Mr. Wallace's voice was soothing.

"You know you can come into the office and we'll walk you through this," he said to Sue Crawford, patting her shoulder.

At one point, he had to collect himself; he walked down the slope by himself and gazed at the stunning view of Rossford.

"These people have been through so much," he said. "They've done a heck of a job here. They're to be commended."

Some of the sites need more loads of sand and dirt to be raised to sidewalk level, he said. And given that the lots are so narrow, the owners would do well to work together to devise a plan. Ms. Crawford insists she'll construct a single or two-family home.

Byron Stanger wants condominiums. For nearly a decade, he has purchased property along this stretch of river. He owns nine properties in the 2400 block of Broadway, three on the odd-numbered river side, and six on the less desirable west side of the street, where backyards bump into railroad tracks.

Nearby, he owns another three river-side rental properties. A home at 2420 Broadway, owned and lived in by his daughter, Danielle, until a few weeks before the fire, was close enough to the heat that the siding melted.

A week before the fire, Mr. Stanger, who works at DaimlerChrysler AG's Toledo Machining plant in Perrysburg Township, transferred the deeds to a limited liability company.

He does most of the upkeep on the 40 units he owns in various neighborhoods and was across the street changing a tire on a small tractor when someone alerted him to the fire in one of his units. He ran in the house, grabbed a fire extinguisher upstairs, and tried to put it out.

If the five owners won't band together to build condos, Mr. Stanger said he'll build a three-unit condo where his conjoined houses sat. "The biggest thing is getting a foundation in before winter," he said.

Whatever wrangling occurs between the owners, the 14 tenants will have moved on, their lives forever changed.

Matt Wagner and his friends have moved near Walbridge Park into a house furnished mostly with donations. "It's pretty well back to normal. All we have to do is write thank-you notes," said Mr. Wagner, 22.

He's replaced his Ovation Legend guitar and got a six-month-old dog from the Humane Society he named Stella.

"I'll probably never look at material objects the same again," he said. "And I'll never look at family and friends the same again. ... Everybody was more than helpful. It made you feel very loved."

Back at the site recently between teaching classes, Brenda Wyatt noticed the fire had confused even Mother Nature. Intense heat triggered a false springtime, popping sunflower kernels into lanky seedlings. Growing from ashen soil were a volunteer tomato plant, lemon balm, and motherwort. The trunk of an old black locust tree is scorched, but a few new leaves are sprouting.

Ms. Wyatt plucked a bright yellow bloom of forsythia, which normally flowers in April.

"It's got a wonderful fragrance," she said.

Contact Tahree Lane at: tlane@theblade.com or 419-724-6075.

First Published October 23, 2005, 1:46 p.m.