6 days Ago
Three months ago, I interviewed the first of dozens of wildfire survivors in Pasadena and Altadena. Her name was Sylvia, and back then, she and her son still didn’t know if their home survived the wildfire that chased them out of their home in the early morning hours of Jan. 7.
She was 87. She felt optimistic one moment, then fretted about the antiques she didn’t grab on their frantic way out.“All I have are little treasures,” she said, not saying what she was truly saying.
Her home survived. I hope she is surviving too.Amid the rubble of an Altadena home, someone took the trouble to piece this dish or vase together, a small effort to help.
(Courtesy, Merrilee Fellows)The story of one of the worst nights of her life played over and over my head for days afterward, joined by the ongoing narration of other voices, using the same words: unbelievable, unimaginable, unprecedented. Inferno. Fire tornado.
Everything gone.Who knows how to navigate the magnitude of loss in the Eaton fire, starting with the 18 dead (Rodney, Evelyn, Erliene, Oswald, Carolyn, Edwin, Barbara, Anthony, Victor, Lora and Zhi Feng).They recount the what ifs and should haves and if only’s from this searingly painful chapter of their lives, and the bright sider in me holds on this Holy Week to the small stuff, that are really the big stuff, right?The teenager who started a book drive so children whose books burned in the fires could restart their home libraries, because, she said, she could only imagine what that loss would feel like.
The woman who raced to her grandmother’s home the night of Jan. 7 and heard her say later that the wind kept pushing the front door open and the fire was coming in from every exit, “but I wasn’t afraid and Jesus told me you were on your way.” “Grammy,” the granddaughter says, tucking her head under her Grammy’s chin.
The octogenarian who proclaimed all she wants in any rebuilt home is an exact replica of her 1960s-era bathroom in all its pink and blue tiled glory. And the friend who told her she would have it.The people at the Gamble House offering Respite Recitals on its lawn, a time to disconnect and just sit in a garden and listen to free music.
The World Central Kitchen mobile truck that saw three people cleaning up fallen tree branches at an Arcadia church and stopped to give them sandwiches.The Sikh American outside the Pasadena Community Job Center who cheerfully kept up a running commentary about how delicious the matcha tea his friend brewed up would be, and when he served it with a smile, indeed it was.The one man who returned to a burned home (not his) so many times he had to be told “stop, it’s okay,” because he wanted to find the medallion from his friends’ mother’s urn, to give that one little thing back.
And last week, there was the recently retired Merrilee Fellows: do you need to know she’s suffered much loss, too, but keeps doing good? She is climbing and picking her way through the rubble of a friend’s still-uncleared home near Chaney Trail. It is hot and she is sweaty but she was on a mission to find a jar of coins the homeowners thought would have survived the fire.“I used a metal detector and when I received a strong signal, I picked up a shovel and removed debris,” she said.
“I found only one coin and that was away from the target area. I was able to find a few items that were in good shape. I would like to think they can display these in their next home to think fondly about their life in these hills.
”Aside from the many trucks removing debris, she could hear birds chirping: Western Bluebirds, California Towhees, Acorn Woodpeckers, Bushtits, Northern Flicker, Cassin’s Kingbird.“I turned over one piece of decaying wood and saw a cup fungus,” she said. “There is life all around us, even if the fire has altered the community we love.
”Then she looked down and saw pieces of frosted glass, assembled like a puzzle. Someone, from the EPA perhaps, saw this broken glass and took the time to fit them together. Not enough to make it whole.
But maybe enough?Merrilee said she senses a renaissance coming to Altadena, if the small gestures and little acts of kindness and the “you are not alone”-ness continues and spreads. If the offers to help continues in the coming months and years, not only while the chimneys stand alone among the debris.Easter will hit differently in the San Gabriel Valley this year.
We have been tried by fire, the priests say. Can we put the pieces back together, together? I have stories that say so. I have stories that say yes yes yes.
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