Bar exam. War. Fire. Is the plague of locusts next?

Taking the Texas bar exam, reuniting with her spouse who is returning from war, packing up a household and losing nearly everything in a fire. Welcome to the life of Amy Cabrero (pictured) , a 2008 graduate of Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. Cabrero is on her way today to San Diego with her husband Mike, a staff sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps who recently completed a tour of duty in Iraq. Mike arrived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area July 31, in time to meet Amy in Arlington as she finished the three-day Texas bar exam. It was the first time in seven months that the couple, married for three years, had seen each other.  “I was sort of exhausted and elated, all at the same time,” Amy recalls. The Cabreros packed and sent the furnishings of their three-bedroom, Fort Worth apartment in a moving van to a leased house in San Diego, where Mike is stationed and where Amy will be searching for a job. Monday the couple learned that the moving truck and their belongings were destroyed in a fire caused by an electrical shortage in the truck’s cab. “We’re gonna start from scratch,” she says. “We just have a car and a 90-pound dog,” an American Bulldog named Jake. The Cabreros also have an air mattress donated by a friend and some towels they bought at WalMart. “We’ll start over as soon as we get there,” she says. Insurance will help cover the cost of replacing some of the Cabreros’ destroyed clothing, books, furniture and appliances. But other items are irreplaceable, Amy says, such as the double wedding ring quilt her mom spent two years making by hand as a wedding present. “Thankfully, I had pulled out our photographs to ride in the car with us,” she says. Amy says there’s another item worth noting. “I had just gotten my law school diploma back from being custom framed, just in time to be on the moving truck,” she says. “And it got burned up in the fire. That’s the icing on the cake.”
-- Jeanne Graham