You Can't Go Home

...and I really don't want to

Or perhaps some people can. I tried after I thought I wouldn’t, even swore I wouldn’t. When a dear friend visited the end of May, I noticed how much Eric and I talked about the fire. Here it is almost two years later and I could imagine the glazing over of her eyes as nearly every topic we got into somehow led back to the fire. The fire, the fire, the effin’ fire.

For those who do not know, we lost our home of 20 years (where we raised three of our kids through high school) in the Caldor Fire in August of 2021. I wrote and talked extensively about it and it feels like something regarding the fire still comes up every. damned. day.

To recap, it used to look like this:

Then it looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

Over the past two years since the fire (August 16, 2021), Eric and my kids have gone up from time to time. Eric went up as soon as they cleared residents to return and our garden was still smoking, so he had to call CalFire to come put it out. They saw the devastation first hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to go.

I remember maybe three months later, a different errand took me to the bottom of the hill that started the ascent into our community (Somerset Corner if anyone is local). I thought I should go up since I was so close, only 20 min or so away, but I could not make myself do it. I had a mild panic attack and drove home.

Yesterday, Eric and I tried to go to the butcher shop we like, but they were closed for vacation. I asked Eric if he had anything planned for the rest of the day and he said he didn’t, I then asked how he felt about taking me up to our old property. He thought it was a good plan and off we went. It was very spontaneous and had I known when we left our house that we would do it, I would have dressed differently and certainly brought tools to gather graveyard dirt.

As we started up the mountain toward our house, I expected to feel overwhelming emotion and Eric checked in on me from time to time, expected it as well. I felt no emotion at all and began to suspect I might be somehow broken. I thought I would feel sadness, anger, at the minimum, some nostalgia. I felt…nothing.

I did, however, have a physical response the closer I got. My palms started to sweat, my stomach clenched up, my chest felt tight, and I had some shortness of breath. That led me to believe something was imminent, which made me even more anxious.

It is stunning to round one specific corner of the twisting road and suddenly be in a complete wasteland with literally thousands of dead trees stretching as far as the eye can see. I was even too stunned to get photos of it. No homes, no forest scrub… nothing but black, dead sticks shooting up a hundred feet out of the ground.

The way the fire came through, quite literally, you step from normalcy into destruction in a matter of a few feet.

I was shocked to see it in person, but still, no significant emotional response.

We went to the cemetery that I explored so many times and that was like a second home for me there. It was mostly destroyed since so many of the markers were wood. The demarcation between the consecrated and unconsecrated areas is now gone, which is fitting.

Then it was on to my house. The absence of the usual landmarks confused me a bit and I had trouble figuring out where the house had been and the overall orientation of the place, but Eric was helpful. I’m tellin’ y’all, marry an engineer. It is priceless.

In the above photo, you can see how the fireline starts at my property and across the street from me, it is as though nothing at all happened. Their homes were not even scorched a little where from my house westward, there is nothing but destruction.

Still… nothing. At last, after snapping some photos, I told Eric, “Get me out of here.” I intended to stop and see my friend, Liz (whose house was untouched by the fire), but I did not have it in me.

As we made our way back down the mountain, I started to feel things, but I had trouble recognizing it at first because it did not fit the mold of what I expected, so it seemed foreign.

I started talking it through with Eric and pretty soon, the words were just tumbling out of me. It started with feeling disconnected, that there was nothing there for me. I loved and appreciated the mementos that I lost in the fire: items my late parents owned, things from my childhood, things from my kids when they were little, etc. They are gone. My fur babies are still there, but they are under the ground, long buried. Most of the people I loved are no longer there. I felt no tie to it at all, even though it was our family home for so long.

That led to something else.

I was jubilant. I was free. Recognizing that let me realize how unbelievably miserable I had been for so long in that house. It was too small for our family, but we made it work. The kitchen was the size of an RV kitchen. It was an A frame, so the upstairs rooms had cock-eyed ceilings. There was only one main bathroom with five to seven people living there at any given time. There was a half-bath in a downstairs office that was always someone’s room, so not really available. The heat and AC had not worked in the house for the past ten years almost, so we made do with the wood stove and a portable evaporative cooler.

The threat of snow loomed from October through the end of May. We literally had a snowstorm one year AFTER the kids got out of school in June. We could get 10-15 feet of snow over a season. The power would go out for days at a time and we were the last in line to get help from PG&E. Skunks, raccoons, bear, and mountain lions shared the mountain with us…relunctantly and angrily. Much like the people in the community, many of which were unkind folks.

Bad things happenend in that house as well. Good things did too, but wow, the bad was super bad.

Eric and I had wanted to move for years, but what held us back was the idea of moving all… that… stuff. YEARS of stuff from my childhood, his, things out kids stored there, and just the menutia of life that collected in the storage sheds because GOD KNOWS we had next to no storage in the house.

It was all gone in a night and so were we. It burned one month after our last child of six moved out on his own. We were fortunate in that our kids got much better schooling than they would have if we had remained in Sacramento as we thought we would. It is as though the house only existed to fulfill that purpose. The house was there for my kids, not for me.

I put off going back because I was afraid of what I would feel. We live in an amazing house now. Eric is a master at real estate ventures and we lived in a perfectly OK little 1000 sf modular home for a year while he hawked the market. We moved into the little house on my 60th birthday, Sept 5, 2021, just a few weeks after the fire. We moved out the end of August 2022 and into our beautiful new home.

Friends and strangers alike helped us to rebuild our life and we felt the true meaning of “community” during that time.

Now, my life is almost unrecognizable from what it was then. Two months after the fire, we retired from having a retail shop (brick and mortar) and moved our business to solely online. This year, we retired from festival vending.

My house is still remote. I don’t think I could ever live around lots of people again. We are only twenty minutes from “civilization” instead of forty-five, like before. We are below the snowline, so we get snow, but it is not debilitating as it was before. I always knew I was going to fall and break a hip just trying to get the mail.

As I drove away from my old home yesterday, my parting thought was “F*** that place.” My youngest son, Nathan, loves the land there and might some day put a house on it but unless one of my kids decides to live there, I do not expect to ever go up there again. I’m closing the chapter on that part of my life and looking forward rather than back.

I love my kids and the adults they became. I am grateful that I had the honor and privilege of being a stay-at-home mom for them. I would not trade that for anythign in the world. I can, however, hold onto those thoughts and still release the place where I raised them for gratitude for all it did for me and forgiveness for the pain and inconvenience it caused.

The unjaded acceptance provided by that trip up the mountain is invaluable beyond measure.

Wagons, ho!

why won’t you let me left align, image??? why?? I have the OCDeeeez!

NOTE: In the future, these types of posts will be in the paid tier so as not to put my personal ramblings onto the people who only want to hear about new products and book releases. :) I got you!

As always, the professional stuff is free and my personal stuff is cheeeap.

Love and blessings to you all. I appreciates you.