My husband shook me from sleep early Monday morning: “Did you see? It happened again.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could tell from the shock in his voice that it wasn’t good. “There was another fire at the school.” 

My stomach dropped. Someone was doing this … on purpose. 

I swiped my phone to life and saw the text message from a neighbor, a video of orange flames lapping at the darkness. I had to replay it half a dozen times to understand what I was seeing. The play structure at our child’s school — Lafayette Elementary in the Outer Richmond — was burning. 

Less than three weeks before, on May 1, our principal, Krishna Kassebaum, called me shortly after 7 a.m. Early morning calls aren’t completely out of the ordinary for us, since I’m the PTA president and Mr. K, as he is affectionately known, has become something like my work wife. 

But that morning, Mr. K was calling to tell me that a PTA-funded storage container had caught fire in the middle of the night. All of our supplies had burned, and a pile of charred debris — blackened snow cone machines, melted Halloween decorations, shreds of school sweatshirts sporting our sunset-hued dolphin logo — was splayed out on the yard, in plain view of the nearly 500 kids about to arrive for school. 

The Lafayette community is a tight one. We are one of the oldest schools in the city, home to the longest-running PTA in the San Francisco Unified School District, having just celebrated our 100th anniversary. Many of our teachers are deep into their second decade here, and more than a few attended Lafayette as kids themselves. After that first fire, the school community — parents and grandparents, staffers and spouses, neighbors, and local business owners —  sprang into action, getting the mess cleaned up quickly and reassuring ourselves that this freak accident wouldn’t put a damper on our end-of-year events. We were shaken, but we would be fine. 

Then this second fire. The slide was incinerated, the metal ladders and platforms crumpled and collapsed, and the melted rubber mats gave off a sickening smell. And once again, the kids were on their way. 

I left the house and jumped on my bike without showering, and without my 8-year-old son, who I would let sleep in on this particular Monday. It’s a six-minute ride to school, but I still didn’t beat the earliest arrivals. We had to secure the gates to the yard, detour all the families to the front door on Anza, keep people moving. 

Over the past two years running the PTA, as SFUSD lobbed problem after problem at us, I viewed my primary political message as, “Don’t panic. It will all be OK.” 

But this? That our kids had to look at the spot where they spent the best parts of their days maliciously destroyed? I was finding it hard to keep my normal calm demeanor. I was vibrating with questions and worries — Is the school safe? Are the police investigating? Will insurance cover a new playground? — and the need to do something.

SFUSD acted promptly, sending out support staff and a team of workers to cordon off the area with an 8-foot fence. Extra security was arranged. But I couldn’t help but picture the inevitable scene at future recesses, the kids peering through the chain link, trading wild who-done-it theories, and quietly realizing that people can be really, really awful. 

After an hour of hanging around, periodically checking in with the well-meaning bureaucrats and the shell-shocked school administrator, I headed home. I needed to take a breath. I watered my garden, drizzling water over a newly potted jade plant clipping.  It had been a gift from Ruth Asawa’s son, Paul Lanier, who had invited me over to the family’s longtime Noe Valley home a few weeks back, while I was working on a story for The Standard about Asawa’s lifetime of arts advocacy work in SFUSD.

I started to think about Asawa right then and there. She believed art wasn’t extra. It was integral to education, and to life. It was cathartic, expressive, instructive, and necessary. And in the wake of an event like Monday’s, I thought it could be the answer. 

I Googled “fence weaving,” clicking through images and reading up on various methods. Then I sent out an email blast to the entire Lafayette community, imploring all adults to gather old sheets, tablecloths, staplers, and scissors, and to meet in the yard at 8 a.m. Tuesday.

It was short notice. So, the next morning I was stunned to see dozens of people already in the yard when I arrived, the sounds of tearing fabric swirling in the air. Soon we had four long tables piled high with 3-inch-wide strips of fabric and ribbon arranged by color. 

People came bearing coffee and orange juice, sesame balls and shrimp dumplings. The PTA co-presidents of nearby Argonne Elementary showed up, their arms filled with red and white ribbon leis. Parents at their school had been weaving them for weeks to present them to the kindergarteners on graduation day. They decided to give them to us instead. 

Throughout the day, more than 100 people showed up, many planting themselves in front of a section of fence and weaving for hours and hours. As the sections came to life, you could see personalities and styles emerge: Decima, the professional seamstress and costume designer for some of the city’s best drag queens, created a panel of billowing flowers with bright taffeta. Cristina, the physician, lovingly wrapped white strips into the shape of a jumping dolphin. Danny, the woodworker (who’s also my husband), wove meticulous stripes fastened with stick-straight lines of staples. Anna, a knitting enthusiast, arrived with a segmented sketch of a complex diamond pattern, enlisting half a dozen others to bring it to life across three sections of fence. 

The conversation and laughter was constant, except for the 30 minutes when the fifth-graders spilled out onto the yard to rehearse their graduation ceremony, serenading us with “Rainbow Connection” and “It’s a Wonderful World.” If anyone wasn’t already misty-eyed, that one put us all over the edge. 

Just an hour shy of the dismissal bell, the entire enclosure had been woven and wrapped in joyful scenes and patterns, completely obscuring the devastation of the fire, which the San Francisco Fire Department is still investigating as a possible arson. As the kids poured out of the building, they collectively gasped. “It kind of looks … happy now!” one girl exclaimed. 

I wish that someone had not set these fires in our school yard — a crime that appears to be spreading to other schools and parks in our area. I wish, after a year of budget headaches and way too many emergency meetings, we didn’t have to figure out how to solve yet another crisis. 

But as Asawa demonstrated, a life spent fixing the things you know are broken can be a beautiful one. Especially if you add taffeta.