The Fire Diaries – One Year Later

The Eaton Fire that took out much of Altadena started one year ago on this date, January 7, 2025. It was already January 8 when I locked the door to our house and joined my husband, our dog, and three cats. We were confident that we’d be back

Well, obviously, we didn’t get back, and won’t ever be back to the house we’d lived in for almost 30 years. The house we loved, even as we cursed the little things wrong and the inconvenience of trying to stuff early 21st Century stuff into a house built one hundred years earlier. A house filled with memories of our lives together. A house stuffed with mementos, heirlooms, and dozens of connections to my and my husband’s respective pasts. It’s all gone. Our early handwritten manuscripts. Our first 78s. Gone.

We are in the process of rebuilding. We love Altadena, and even though the community that we will come back to will be different, many of our neighbors will be there. Some of our favorite businesses survived, and we are already patronizing them again.

I am not the only person with tales to tell about the Eaton Fire and its enormous impact on our lives. I have only my own tale to offer. Several times, in the weeks after the fire, people told me that I needed to write about it. As a writer, I could tell the story better than most. I don’t know about that. And initially, I was too overwhelmed with grief, and the need to make a thousand decisions all at once. The only thing I was able to write was this post for the Blackbird Writers in late January.

But now the time has come. I will not promise a story of survival and rising above, although I hope it will be. I will promise to be as honest as I can be. There might be some naughty words, so you have been warned. Yeah, I know. My big character is a nice Victorian lady who tries not to raise her voice, let alone swear, and I swear like a stevedore.

Nor will this be on a schedule. It will probably be intermittent as hell. But I’ll do my best to recount what happened to us when the Eaton Fire in Altadena robbed so many of us.