March 2025

February 2025

January 2025

Eaton Fire Changes Life

Ah, the night that changed so many things— for us and for thousands of others.  It blasted almost everything apart for Kit and me, really. Our garden and house are gone forever, and they had given us peace, privacy, and enabled the individual habits of creative work that sustained us. Each of us was the happiest we had ever been, and now we are not. We are unsettled in every sense of the word. 

    I was eight years old when my family moved to Altadena from Connecticut, but a younger eight years old than eight is now. I was dismayed there were no monkeys in the soaring palms that looked like telephone poles to me. Instead, there was incredible heat, crazy smog that made your chest hurt when you breathed, and the looming, dusty-looking San Gabriels that seemed ugly to me. 

    New friends helped, of course, and so did playing Kick-the-Can outside and taking occasional family hikes. Millard Canyon was my favorite destination, but its cozy summer streams and gentle trails seemed to have little to do with the mountains that still seemed so unfamiliar— like a towering cowboy movie backdrop half-encircling Altadena. 

    We avoided Eaton Canyon. This stubbornly-held attitude wasn’t helped by my first ten-day summer stretch at the Girl Scout camp, Singing Pines, when the entire camp had to flee in the middle of the night to another camp— that served a far more delicious breakfasts than ours!— because of a fire. But we felt more excited and important than scared as we were trundled back down the mountain that day to our surprised families. 

    Other random San Gabriel “fire-scapes” that I recall: a girl in my class at Pasadena High School shrieking and running out of the room as she saw flames jump a hill and near her home;  my sons talking their way past the barricade during the ‘93 fire, when I was back in Philadelphia with Kit, my sons determined to rescue my drawings from their storage drawers; me leaving the house at dawn the day I got back to draw the burned hills along the New York Drive extension, almost getting cited in the process; packing a bulky “go bag” during one prolonged, back-and-forth fire, then falling over it a couple of weeks later.  
   

But this fire… Although we live half-a-block east of Lake Avenue, that now-infamous line of demarcation, we left the house before getting the order to evacuate, thanks to my friend and neighbor Patti Chen. She looks out for us, I’m grateful to say, and when she called, telling me that she and her daughters were evacuating because of the fire, which seemed to me to have just started, she said Kit and I should leave, too. I started to debate this, when she asked, 
“Have you looked out of the window lately?” 

    That’s never a bad question. 

    I went upstairs, and I could see not only a glow past the end of Mendocino, but a flaming tree— with its black skeleton outlined in front. “We’re going,” I said to Kit, imagining the horror of being trapped in a cul-de-sac during a deadly fire. 

    After grabbing a few goofy, random things, Kit remembering a bulky bathrobe he hates but forgetting his prescriptions and computer, for instance, while I did little better, we “headed down the hill” toward our granddaughter’s apartment. From there, a day later, we went to her fiancé’s relative’s house in Burbank for three nights, where we were treated to a Filipino hospitality and kindness we had never anticipated. Our hostess seemed ready for us to stay with her forever, but we were bound for Kit’s daughter’s house in La Quinta, a home that couldn’t be better designed for guests— even guests with a confused little dog, Dilly, a recent rescue,  who neighbors seemed way too eager to analyze. But you can lose autonomy when you lose your home, we were learning— or lose your health, for that matter. 

    We were in La Quinta for three weeks. I dealt daily with either the mind-numbing details of insurance matters or the challenges of finding us a Pasadena apartment while perching in a distant desert town. Our fourth and final destination, where we are now, was an AirB+B guesthouse near Victory Park. We are thrilled to have our privacy once more as we wait to move to our apartment toward the end of March. 

    Of course we went up the hill to see what had happened to Altadena— and to the house. Daffodils and snowdrops were blooming in the garden behind the ruins. Kit discovered forty gallery-ready paintings reduced to ashes in the ugly garden shed I’d always hated. This, two days after his gallery in Palm Desert had sold another to a collector. The shed survived, of course, as did many of Kit’s sculptures, heroically save by our artist friend Evan Chambers, who shares a new motto with his writer-wife Caitlyn, “Run toward the pain.”  

    Evan and Caitlyn also lost their west Altadena home and his work, by the way, and he and Caitlyn have two young children to care for. 
    Our dog Dilly stunned both Kit and me with her seeming sorrow when we left our hundred year-old home for the last time. She had to be coaxed to eat even a little of her meal. 

She retreated under the bed, but of course, she knew it had been “house.” 

My own drawings are gone forever: the work that I felt somehow truly connected me to the world for the first time, work that had been my focus from 1968, when I was first taught by noted Altadena artist Charles White, until 1995, when a chronic illness “compromised” my vision. I’d been represented by galleries, here and in Canada, and had been given shows in universities and small museums across the country. My work had led to a correspondence, and later friendship, with Sister Wendy Beckett, the brilliant “art nun” of PBS fame. Our years-long correspondence was now gone, as was the book in which she’d written an essay about me, my work, and my connection to nature.  

    Yes, I had come to love our mountains. 

    All slides, negatives, and photographs of my drawings are gone, along with the journals I’d kept since 1989. It felt like being 100 years dead, when even memories of oneself have disappeared. 

    And yet “It was a privilege making them,” I had told a collector of my drawings only a month earlier— when he was leaving his medical practice to pursue a life in photography. I started writing books when I could no longer draw the way I wanted to, and thirty-nine of them were published, selling a lot of copies. Something like a dozen children’s novels are still in print, but all my hardcover copies are gone, as well as my inventory.  

    When you write for children, they outgrow you, but you are still warmed by the memories of the boy who slept with two of my books under his pillow each night because he was teased at school, but the main character was like him; or the child who wrote, ‘I’m glad someone knows the true me.” I hope I helped make them feel less alone.   

    Fire can’t take that treasure away from me. The work will live on for a while. 

    What happens now? Kit and I are not really equipped for apartment life, though living on one level will be a relief. We are already trying to divide our second bedroom several ways and have hired a trainer to “assess” Dilly and her quirks. 

    As for what happened on January 7th, 2025, we all know that it was no ordinary fire. Deadly mistakes were made by some in authority, many will agree. But I think we can also agree that others in our lives, from Pasadena Villagers to neighbors to friends and even new acquaintances, have done more than expected to help us during this time.

    And that was— and is— a humbling and beautiful thing to experience.