“A beam came down off the porch roof,” she said, simply.

“Across my back.

I felt it, and I kept walking, because the one thing I was not going to do was drop her.

And I carried her out onto the front lawn, and I put her down in the grass, and people came running.” Natalie, she said, had nothing worse than a little smoke in her lungs, cleared up in a day.

Edith spent four months in a specialized burn unit, and came home with the back she would hide for the next forty years.