By the time I arrived at the latest Lewiston house fire, the flames had been knocked down. All that remained were the iron gray plumes of stubborn smoke.

Firefighters had made quick work of this one, but no matter. Fire feeds fast and requires but bare seconds to wreak its singular brand of havoc upon human lives.

On a patch of grass across the street sat a mother and son, their faces buried in their hands. I imagine that inside their heads were running inventories of all that might be lost to the flames — the clothes, the furniture, the book collections.

I imagine this because I’ve seen it so many times before. When people are subjected to the cruel vision of their lives going up in smoke, those running tallies are so vivid, so anguished, that I find it a wonder the poor souls don’t go stark, raving mad right on the spot.

Fire doesn’t just take all the things you need to live in safety and comfort, it will just as greedily take the past from you, as well.

All those old love letters from a long-ago romance. A stack of photo albums that had survived for decades, passed down from one generation to the next. Those bright, happy drawings your 5-year-old created for you on the first day of kindergarten. The threadbare bathrobe you inherited from your dad. That patchwork quilt your gramma made you just before her arthritic hands failed her for good.

Poof! Gone in an instant, all of it. All of that and a thousand other things you haven’t yet thought of as the fire continues to rage before your eyes.

Fire is cruel that way. It doesn’t just destroy everything a person has accumulated over a lifetime, in many cases it then makes that person watch the annihilation from a safe but dismal distance.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a dozen area families burned out of their homes like this. One fire alone, on Davis Street in Lewiston on April 7, sent nine families fleeing to safety as uncompromising flames took everything they had.

A week later, a family of five on College Street were sent packing as flames blackened all the things that had made them happy and comfortable — blackened those things and then turned them to ash.

For the rest of us, these fires bring collateral horror because fire is indiscriminate and could come for any one of us at any hour of day. Deep in our fretful bones, we know this because the dread of fire is an ancient thing, hardwired into our souls.

We read about the latest life-wrecking blaze in the newspaper and mutter “tsk tsk” before absently wandering around the house to check smoke alarm batteries and the dates on wall-mounted extinguishers.

That’s how it goes for me, at any rate.

When I went to cover the latest Lewiston fire, on Dumont Avenue last week, I was befriended by a neighbor who had come rushing to the scene to aid the victims.

She was winded and wide-eyed like everyone else, but for a moment she just stood on the sidewalk watching the smoke rise from the back of that tidy home that burned.

“God,” she said, “I hate fires.”

Turns out that when this lady was 7 years old, her home on Blake Street burned to the ground. Decades later, she still remembers the building collapsing under the enormity of heat and fire. Having experienced as a child the life-changing chaos a house fire brings with it, she has lived in terror of the flames coming for her again.

By the end of the conversation, we were pretty much agreed: There’s not much worse than being burned out of your home, we mused, and having to start all over again from scratch.

And then, over the weekend, fire did its vile business at a 2 1/2-story home in Hiram. But the occupants of this one didn’t have the chance to stand across the street and watch their lives burning down.

The lady of the house never made it off the upper floor — by the time fire crews reached her, she was dead; not a thing, this time, but a life taken by smoke and fire.

Her husband, meanwhile, was severely burned and flown to a Portland hospital, his very survival in question.

I imagine this poor soul will at some point awake, in pain and anguish, to begin the process of tallying up all that has been lost. And this particular tally is so dark, so soul-blistering grim that we can hardly imagine what those days will be like for him. Most of us won’t even let our minds linger there for long because it’s just too terrible a thought.

So cruel is a house fire that those who escape with just the clothes on their backs could be considered the lucky ones.

Others truly lose it all to the flames.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist who has covered the police beat since 1994.