We’re happy and relieved to be home, and to see the evacuation areas and warnings near us being lifted. It’s been a rough couple of days, and devastating for many thousands of people, a handful of whom we know personally.
This includes:
A friend my human has known for 30 years, who lost the Pacific Palisades house she grew up in, leaving her and her mother homeless.
Several colleagues my human worked with when she was a music journalist.
The trainer and animal expert my human and I have worked with on several videos and photo sessions for Sleepypod. She escaped with her dogs and spouse and everything else is gone.
Many historic places that have been around for over 100 years are gone. Must-visit Malibu restaurants burnt to the ground. The scenic Pacific Coast highway is all ashes and blackened, skeletal structures. Pretty much all of Pacific Palisades is gone. And before you shrug that off as an enclave of the wealthy, it also has a brilliant history of mid-century artists and intellectuals. That history has vanished.
We were very lucky, multiple times over. We didn’t have to evacuate, but felt it was wise to. Our electricity was out, the air was unbreathable, and only a freeway and a hill separated us from the mandatory evacuation zone. We had places to go, first to a friend’s townhouse in the lower part of Pasadena, and then my human’s boyfriend’s ranch in the desert. At 6 AM on Wednesday morning, finding a hotel was impossible. They were booked up in all the surrounding areas already.
It was a very stressful few days for my human, but she did her best to keep me happy, and keep up with necessary things while we were away. As soon as the electricity went back on at our house, she checked the security cams periodically. She saw the peach kitty a couple of times, and one of the neighborhood raccoons. And saw that otherwise, things were quiet.
Along the way, she learned a few things:
- It’s possible to love something dearly and not be attached to it.
Anyone who knows my human knows she loves her stuff, and she keeps a lot of things (some of them pretty silly) that have a sentimental value. She also loves her house. But she didn’t hesitate to leave all those things behind. And if she had lost them all, she would have had no regrets. Up until now, the idea of love and detachment being compatible was a foreign concept to her. - It’s okay to be attached to stuff even when someone else isn’t.
Just because my human realized this about herself, she knows that doesn’t mean everyone is the same way. She knows some people are destroyed over what they’ve lost, and they may never recover from it. And that’s an equally valid point of view, and probably a much more common situation. - If there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do about that.
We had to leave the peach kitty behind because there would have been no way to find him. We don’t know where he goes when he’s not visiting, and he would not let my human catch him anyway. So while she was concerned about him, she didn’t kill herself with worry about him either. She was relieved to see him on the security cam, though! And he was literally the only thing left behind that she cared about at all. - She needs a better evacuation set up!
She left quite a few things behind that she should have taken like insurance documents, her parents’ death certificates, and some other paperwork. She just packed her personal records and that was it. Everything should be in one secure place to grab and go instead of in several areas of the house, like they have been here. Also she left behind a couple of stupid things, like deodorant and her sweater coat, which she really could have used during the cold desert nights.
So yes, we’re home and although we are getting back to our regular schedule, things will never really be the same.
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