Smith: Smoke, sparks appeared in the fire survivor’s oven, and then ...

The terror flared back into Annette Balestrieri’s life like a dormant ember.

Her oven was preheating midday Saturday as she assembled ingredients for cookies in the kitchen of the small Windsor house she bought after her larger Larkfield home was incinerated by last year’s Tubbs fire.

“I heard a clicking sound,” shared Balestrieri, who’s 77 and retired from a career in cosmetology. She turned to see sparks flying inside her suddenly smoky oven.

You can imagine her terror.

She thought, “I can’t have this house burn down, too!”

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BALESTRIERI QUICKLY turned the oven off and the kitchen fan on. Then she dialed 911.

She told the dispatcher she did not have a major emergency, but her oven had sparked and smoked. A Windsor Fire Protection District truck arrived lickety-split.

The firefighters turned off the electrical breaker to the oven, then inspected the appliance. They saw the baking coil had malfunctioned.

Balestrieri was rattled, obviously. She recalls saying something to the firefighters along the lines of, “I just can’t take one more fire.”

Naturally, she mentioned that when the oven went haywire she was preparing to bake some cookies. One of the firefighters seemed quite interested in just what sort of cookies they were to be.

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THUMBPRINT COOKIES, Balestrieri told him. They’re the kind you make by rolling dough into little balls, then pressing your thumb into each to make a crater, then filling it with jam.

The curious firefighter asked even about the type of jam Balestrieri used. “I told him, I use some raspberry, some lemon, some orange.”

She heaped thanks on the firefighters as they left. Then she put away all of her cookie makings; there’d be no more baking until the oven was repaired.

Maybe an hour later, Balestrieri’s phone rang. It was one of the Windsor firefighters, asking if she was OK and if she expected to be home later that afternoon.

Surprised by the question, she said she would. About an hour after the call, up pulls a fire engine.

And four firefighters appeared at Balestrieri’s door - with a large tray of freshly baked thumbprint cookies.

“I was blown away,” Balestrieri said. She hugged the men and insisted they take some of the biscotti she’d baked without incident the day before.

“They are beyond belief,” she said. About the firefighters, not the biscotti.

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WORD OF WHAT Acting Capt. Mike Stornetta, Battalion Chief Fred Leuenberger, Engineer Tom Rathbun and Firefighter Joel Ferguson had done reached Windsor battalion chief and fire marshal Matt Gustafson.

He approved.

“That’s something that whether we stay small as a fire department or get large as a fire department, we always want to be that fire department that does that little extra stuff,” Gustafson said.

Balestrieri, whose faulty oven coil has since been replaced, still can’t believe those firefighters left her house and set to baking for her.

Or how extremely well they did with the Thumbprints.

“Their cookies look like they came out of bakery,” she said, “and mine look like a disaster.”

You can reach columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.