‘Village’ pitches in to help

Community puts roof over heads of family left homeless by fire

There’s a slightly smoky smell in the new living room of Carolyn Cummins and Dan Adamson.

It might be coming from the dog’s fur — Ruby hid in the basement when the family home near Bathurst and Dupont Sts. went up in flames last week.

More likely, the smell is stuck in Cummins and Adamson’s hair after a visit to what’s left of their home of five years Monday.

But there’s no worry on the couple’s faces. Their son, Tyler, still had his third birthday party Sunday. And Toby, 6, didn’t miss a school day after the fire.

“Normalcy, let’s go for normalcy,” Cummins says with a laugh.

It took a village — rather, a fairly new but tight-knit community — to help the family land on its feet in a new home, with clothes in the dressers, food on the table and presents under a new tree.

And it all happened less than a week after a fire tore through the unoccupied side of a semi-detached home that was under renovation, forcing the family out at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday. “There’s something special about the community here,” Cummins said, sitting in their new temporary home, a few blocks away. Cummins, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Adamson, the owner of a software start-up company, said the support from neighbours came instantly. “You hear the stories of the little communities in rural areas where they help rebuild a barn that went down,” Adamson said. “This is a lot like that. It’s a big surprise that it exists in a big city.” The family has lived in three different neighbours’ houses and a hotel since the fire. On Sunday, they moved into a furnished house just in time for Tyler’s birthday party. Next-door neighbour Courtney Harris has been one of several people helping to put the family back on their feet. “Once we digested what had happened, I knew that they had lost everything,” Harris said, “My house was damaged as well, and there wasn’t a way to accommodate them.’’ Cummins hopes that Harris has kept track of who’s pitched in so she can thank them when she has time to settle down. “It’s been a blur,” Cummins said. “We already felt so lucky in this neighbourhood . . . And now, even more.” With files from Vanessa Lu