Ashes to Ashes

I am, of course, not the only artsy-fartsy person you know of writing this kind of post this week. On December 10th, my husband and I returned to Pasadena after a few years away from the Los Angeles area. Though in 2022 we had anticipated moving permanently to Connecticut, we ended up losing our house to fire in February 2024. We had already missed Los Angeles terribly by that point, so we moved back “home” to the city where we’d lived for about fifteen years prior.

Thirty days later, we had to evacuate.

The wind was otherworldly since five that morning, but we’d made it to the night of the 7th with trees intact and not sensing any smoke on the wind. But our street– one that goes up into the mountains– was suddenly getting flooded with emergency vehicles. I thought nothing of it for about a half hour– I had assumed downed trees, car accidents, maybe a few errant Christmas decorations causing property damage– but then stood up to glance out of our front windows once the sun had fully set.

The hill north and east of our home was on fire.

As you can imagine, I did not mince my words. “Oh, fuck.” My husband was working in his studio, in the spare bedroom. I went and grabbed him.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Twenty minutes later I was making reservations in a pet-friendly hotel in Rancho Cucamonga, 40 miles east of our home. We had to drive through thick smoke, raining ash, and 80 mile per hour winds to get to the freeway. There was a fire in the hills north of us. A small fire near a freeway south of us. All of west LA seemed to already be ablaze. The only place left to go was east.

It was a very nervous 24– maybe even 36? 48? I have no idea– hours to find out if our house was still standing. We had a very real conversation about what we would do if a second house of ours torched in less than 365 days. “We’ll become van people,” I said to my husband. “We’ll live in a van and Instagram it, I guess.”

Our house is fine. We know about a dozen families, personally, who lost everything. We are still battling smoke and smoke damage. Don’t worry, we’re masking up.

The one thing I beg of you is this: please do not ever say, “It was just a house,” or “it was just stuff.”

Yes, you’re right. Some of it is just stuff. But more importantly, most of what we keep in our homes are the tools we have amassed that make us feel like people. The pots and pans in my kitchen do not exist simply because I will die if I do not eat. They exist because I feel like a person when I cook for my husband and my friends. The art supplies we hoard in drawers and boxes exist because people love beauty. The photos of loved ones we collect for generations exist because we, as humans, are aware and we know that our memories are faulty and we dare not forget our grandmother’s eyes.

I am one of the luckiest people in Pasadena today. The fire missed us by half a mile. We can see National Guardsmen standing at the border to Altadena on our street. “They” say it is to stop looters, but that simply cannot be true. There is nothing left there to loot. Everything has become ash. The sentries are doing the gut-wrenching work of battling despair and disbelief, as people stand on my sidewalk, staring in the directions of their former homes, where their hearts once dwelled, and pray they may find a shred of their lives intact. So that they may go on, feeling like the people they once were but never will be again.