January 8 will mark one year since I lost the footprint of my material life. The house I’d been renting in Altadena, California—a house which happened to contain the sum total of my life’s possessions—burned to the ground that morning, along with more than 9,000 other structures in the area and nearly 7,000 more in the Palisades fire across the city. I had evacuated the house around 8:30 p.m. on January 7, taking with me my dog, my laptop computer, a change of clothes, and a half-eaten salmon-and-avocado poke bowl that I figured I’d eat later for dinner. At the last minute, I decided to grab a beloved handbag custom-made by a friend and a pair of two-toned Mavette pointy-toe loafers I happened to know had been discontinued by the designer.
By the next morning, those items, along with my car, would be the sum total of my life’s possessions.
What haunts me is how much time I would have had to take more things, had I known what was about to happen. Something like nine hours elapsed between the moment I pulled out of the driveway and the moment those Leviathan flames began to devour every square inch of the house. In that time, I could have removed valuable artwork and placed it carefully in the car. I could have padded that artwork with bundles of clothing and layers of bedding. I could have taken family photo albums, favorite books, old laptop computers, and even the years’ worth of early drafts of book manuscripts (drafts upon drafts, edited by hand) and shoved them on the floor of the back seat.
I could have thrown in the better part of my shoe collection for good measure. I could have stuffed every piece of jewelry into a pillowcase and tucked it in my suitcase along with the nicer items of clothing. The two pieces that were most beloved of all—purchased at the same time, more than 20 years ago, at a boutique in Omaha, Nebraska—were delicate enough to be tucked into a decent-sized purse. One was a fitted brocade jacket with a dark chinoiserie pattern. The other was a burnt orange satin dress with a beaded mesh overlay that I’d worn to countless weddings and events. It was such a great dress that women routinely ran across the room to tell me how much they admired it.
