Michael Sedano
Uphill from where I’ve stopped to stare, a skip loader scrapes its yellow claw across the cement slab that, today, is what remains of where I used to live. A dream house built upon the legacy of an earlier dream house. A family story to warm the heart.When Barbara died, I went to live with my daughter and granddaughter in this Edenic place. My daughter dubbed it “McDonald’s Urban Farm” and she meant it. She grew prize vegetables, fertilized the crops with the poop from her herd of pygmy goats and two free-range jaulas of laying hens producing dozens of easter egg colored eggs daily, a duck, and a few heirloom turkeys that never made it to a dinner table.
The Eaton Fire took it to the ground in a monstrous catastrophe that ravaged thousands of homes across miles of neighborhoods. We are not alone. An entire community disappeared in that firestorm.
Most of the goats survived. None of the poultry. We’re not sure what happened to the coyotes, the bear, the mountain lions that constantly challenged the security of the barn and jaulas. The horses down the street were evacuated before the entire street burned down.
After a preliminary visit, I abandoned hope of recovering stuff I held precious while I could hold them. I hoped maybe silver bells and bronze sculpture, no hope for my paintings and prints. But I submerged those hopes like I muted my feelings over the years of living with dementia. I reasoned what is gone is gone forever, something I understand with intimate profundity, sabes?
The day of this foto I finally succumbed to the aching longing to sift through the rubble of my stuff.
The drive to my former home takes me through devastated terrain, vast tracts of residential blocks now barren landscapes marked by towering fireplaces without homes to warm, front gates opening to nothing. Brown carcasses of automobiles litter remains of driveways and garages. EPA hands painted a legend “Not EV” across scorched scrap metal heaps.
Turning into the driveway where I used to live, I see the Granada tree’s green leaves. There will be a crop next year. One Aguacate tree survives, its companion a charcoal sculpture. The clean-up crew set up a shelter next to withered orange and toronja trees. The massive Coast Live Oak sports green high up, the fire passed under its canopy. There is life, there is hope, there is rubble.
What did I miss the most? What vain hope of finding a treasure under the ashes?
Computers, cameras, negatives, slides, hard drives, repositories of memories, familia, and experiences. Those artifacts from my parents’ home I carried here; my Dad’s WWII memorabilia, my Mom’s box of pennies.
The Go board Barbara hand-carried from Tokyo because we bought the antique the last few hours of my R&R. My jacks set. My Güiros. The wedding china. the...the...
I had that piano since third grade. And all that sheet music and Ur texts wouldn't have survived, nor the vinyl.
Every stitch of clothing I owned.
I lost everything and have everything I need now. After being motel nomads for two months—I moved six times—I have settled for a year in the same place. My amazing daughter found a three bedroom house and the family is together once again.
I’m not sentenced to restaurant food. I have a kitchen with gas and a few essential pots, pans, and sharp knives.
Thanks to generous friends I have several changes of warm clothes and towels. I have a warm bed, a rudimentary garden in pots, and nothing but Time.
What I do not have is my home and there’s not a darn thing I, nor anyone, can do about that. It is what it is.
