My childhood home is gone, burned to the ground alongside the homes of almost everyone else I grew up with in the Pacific Palisades. I think. I can only guess because almost no one can navigate the narrow, winding roads to check. The fires are still burning, or the smoke is too thick, or the power lines are too tangled.
The howling angry wind that is so loud you can hear it through the television screen.
The howling angry wind that is so loud you can hear it through the television screen. Which was all I was able to witness this through. That and my phone. My godforsaken phone that never stops buzzing and that I can’t put down. “This is bad” the messages read. “Someone saw my street burning on ABC7,” says another. “Our home is gone.” “My parents’ home, too.” “There’s nothing left.” “Your elementary school is gone.” “So is your home.” My home.
Each message includes a picture or a video that proves the cliché: it really does look like a war zone. Or the apocalypse. The fire on one of the ridges was so blinding it looked like the sun crashed and started bleeding into the mountains above my home. My mountains.
I grew up in the Pacific Palisades, which is another way of saying it is not my home now, but is the forever home of my childhood memories. It’s where I learned to ride a bike on Embury Street (riding over — and then off — the lawn and small retaining wall of my neighbors’ front yard until I also figured out how to brake). It’s where the boy up the block and I hatched plans to make money off all our neighbors. We’d sell our drawings! Our homemade “laundry detergent” in Ziploc baggies! Our best idea was the flowers we’d nicked from the neighbors’ gardens to make “bouquets.”
A few streets away from that home on Embury, a boy named Johnny leaned in and kissed me — my first kiss. Not well. He hit my teeth. Or I hit his. But still. A home is four walls, but also memories like these.
Across town, at Palisades Elementary, I learned to read. To play dodgeball and handball. To double Dutch, if only for a few hops. To make friends and keep them. To lose friends and not lose myself.
Across the street from that school, I sang in the youth choir at the town’s Methodist church. I even played the bells. I got braces at the orthodontist by Palisades Park, where I played softball and was given “The Babe Ruth Award” for “Best Hitting Pitcher in Palisades Softball History.” I still have the laminated certificate.
Over the ravine, I survived an earthquake not long after my family moved to a house on Hampden Place. My parents rushed us out of that house so they could get to their news helicopter to cover the destruction from the skies.
I lived a whole lifetime in the Palisades: One filled with mischief and fun, first times and last goodbyes.
I got older, changed schools and then changed schools again. Moved and then moved again. But we always lived in the Palisades. Down on the flats in the part called Huntington; in the pocket streets off Swarthmore; and up on the hill over the Alphabet Streets — right at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains. It was up in that house where I learned the timeless ’90s lesson that all high school house parties end with the police showing up.
It was in that house that we lost my grandmother. Then my parents lost their business, and my dad almost lost his life. I lived a whole lifetime in the Palisades: One filled with mischief and fun, first times and last goodbyes, best friends I still have, and old friendships that never left the neighborhood. It was a life full of all the highs and lows that come with being part of family and part of community.
I wrote this sitting on an airplane last night, 30,000 feet in the air, flying at 530 miles an hour trying to get back to that home, that community, that life. But as I looked at the images on my screen, I prepared myself. What if all that’s left are my memories?
