Molly Baz: What the L.A. Wildfires Couldn’t Take From Me

Sifting. A new word in my vocabulary. Or at least as used in this particular context.

I was used to sifting flour into cheesecake batter and powdered sugar over freshly baked cookies. I did that a lot in my beloved butter-colored kitchen. Now that kitchen was gone, lost with the rest of my home to the fires that devastated Southern Carolina, including my sweet little town of Altadena, in January, and I was standing in a hardware store looking for a KN95 mask, googles, a pair of rubber boots, and extra thick gloves. It had been three weeks since we’d left, and while I’d heard stories from those who had returned, including my husband, I had not gone back myself to survey the damage. I had been hunkering down in a friend’s parents’ place, on nonstop calls with insurance companies and banks, all the while trying to keep a big goofy smile on my face for my 7-month-old son, but also, and most importantly, I couldn’t muster the courage.

It was a special house. My husband designed every square inch of it and outfitted every room with his own furniture. We brought our first child there from the birth center, in the wee hours of the night. I developed recipes and shot a cookbook in that kitchen, hosted countless late-night dinner parties in our cozy living room, and even shot a billboard campaign breastfeeding my son on the island countertop. That house held a lot. It was a home – not just for me, but for everyone who stepped foot in it. Even when you recognize that the important thing in life is the health and safety of your family, and you truly believe it, the loss is still painful. I might not have returned at all, much less sifted through the pile of rubble, had I not thoughtlessly left my engagement ring in my jewelry box in my bathroom.

You never think it will happen to you. This type of tragedy happens to other people. A friend’s cousin’s best friend, separated by several degrees. Stories reported only via a game of telephone, secondhand. The winds were whip-strong the evening we fled, yet our hearts told us that of all the endangered homes nestled below the Eaton Canyon mountain range in our special pocket of the world, ours would be spared. That’s just how things work. It’s the law of something, though I don’t know what. 

We were evacuating out of an excess of caution, not necessity, on the recommendation of a couple of neighbors and spooked-out friends who warned that if winds shifted, the fires might creep over our way in the night. Cell phone reception had been spotty all day and the power had been out for hours, so despite murmurings of a fire erupting across town in the Palisades, news of the blazing ridge a half a mile from our home hadn’t reached us. “Santa Anas” was the word on the street, but Angelenos aren’t scared of little action from Ana. We’re no stranger to her force, and until now she had been all talk. Strong but unmighty, you might say. 

And so we took next to nothing, guided only by a flicker of candlelight. One suitcase between the three of us, hastily filled in the dark. A pair of crumpled sweatpants from the bedroom floor, the shiny black nursing bra that lived in the drawer of my bedside table, a breast pump, three passports, our son’s freshly administered birth certificate, two laptops, and one ratty old black sweater that never sparked joy in the first place. Ill-fitting, pilling around the collar, and certainly–and I cannot stress this enough–not worthy of being the only article of clothing aside from a pair of sweatpants left to my name.

In the days and weeks that followed, mental snapshots of lost belongings would sporadically pop into my head. Images both welcome and unwanted all at the same time. Difficult to acknowledge, yet each a tiny comforting memory, representing a life lived fully, fearlessly, and meaningfully. I’d be on our daily morning walk, a routine established years back that made me feel whole and prepared to face the day, when a vision of the contents of my bedside table would suddenly reveal itself: a note my best and oldest friend wrote me on the day of my son’s birth, a strip of photos from our very first ultrasounds, and a pile of at least 17 neglected chapsticks that I now missed so much. 

In general I live without a lot of regrets. I prefer to look forward, not backward. But in those days I kept returning to the same question: What was I thinking? How could I have grabbed my passport and not my engagement ring? A replaceable form of legal documentation rather than the symbol of my marriage, the single most important relationship in my life aside from the one with my totally scrumptious son?

As I drove down our street for the first time since its demise, I felt nothing. Utter shock. Total lack of comprehension. Though I thought I had a sense of what to expect, you can’t really picture what a barren, burnished, houseless piece of land will look like until you witness it firsthand. The whole of Altadena flattened, dry, and lifeless. It’s such an unimaginable sight that your logical brain comes to a screeching halt.

I marched straight into the rubble. I think subconsciously I wanted to feel something, and I knew that if I thrust myself inside the now wall-less boundaries of what was once a place I called home, I would. Silently, I walked through the house clocking melted, misshapen remnants that helped me find my way. Through the garage, past the metal frame of my old Mercedes, up into the kitchen where singed cast-iron skillets oriented me, and finally into our bedroom and bathroom, which made itself known thanks only to a pile of still intact but discolored tiles that had once lined our shower. I knelt down, overwhelmed at the task ahead and started to gently brush away the ash. 

There it was. My cloudy, tarnished, flattened engagement ring. No more than three seconds into the sifting, exactly where some deeply intuitive part of my soul told me it would be. 

Since the fires, I’d been overwhelmed by expressions of love. My husband turned a sorrowful moment into a joyful one when, on a trip to the mall to buy socks because my only pair had become brown and ragged, he reminded me that we’d always said there is no greater luxury in life than a fresh pair of socks. My blissfully ignorant son learned to sip out of a straw and then immediately upon mastery of the task, reached out for me to share his delicious juice. Less than 24 hours after we evacuated, my brother drove back to our still smoldering home to salvage the few remaining discernable items, then quietly cleaned them and kept them safe until he knew I was emotionally ready to receive them. A woman I’d never met DM’d me offering to drop off a bag of groceries and a quart of home-cooked lamb ragu.