Fire brings destruction but it also brings heat, warmth, cooked food and cleansing. When the Thomas Fire consumed our family home the morning of December 5th, 2017, we were shocked. We evacuated knowing that it was the safe thing to do but had no way of knowing that we would be back a few short hours later to find little more than a pile of rubble where our home, hot tub and comfy couches had been.
Losing our things was rough at first. It fuzzed up our heads, leaving us confused and overwhelmed. Did we really just lose our home? Are all our things really gone? It took a few days but when that reality set in, it was like a weight dropped onto our backs. So much work to do to find a place to stay, figure out what we would do for food, snacks, underwear and slacks and that was only the beginning.
No tools, laptop chargers, stickers or beds for our boys. It wasn't so much an emotional journey but a stark confrontation with the magnitude of the task at hand. We were together and left an hour or so before the mandatory evacuation so we were all physically safe and healthy which was by far the biggest blessing from the entire experience.
As we sorted through random donations and ran errands for hours on end, the tables turned. We encountered an entire community that had faced the Thomas Fire together. Our entire community stayed up all night watching as it danced around the hillsides, at times moving as fast as one acre per second, buffeted by 80 mile-per-hour winds that carried ash in overhead rivers of fire.
We discovered beauty in the ashes. Not of our home...as not much was left there...but the ashes spread around our community. As friends and family rinsed the ash off of their cars and homes, they were compelled to pour out onto those who, like us, lost everything. We were humbled by the outpouring of support from family and friends
Losing our things was rough at first. It fuzzed up our heads, leaving us confused and overwhelmed. Did we really just lose our home? Are all our things really gone? It took a few days but when that reality set in, it was like a weight dropped onto our backs. So much work to do to find a place to stay, figure out what we would do for food, snacks, underwear and slacks and that was only the beginning.
No tools, laptop chargers, stickers or beds for our boys. It wasn't so much an emotional journey but a stark confrontation with the magnitude of the task at hand. We were together and left an hour or so before the mandatory evacuation so we were all physically safe and healthy which was by far the biggest blessing from the entire experience.
As we sorted through random donations and ran errands for hours on end, the tables turned. We encountered an entire community that had faced the Thomas Fire together. Our entire community stayed up all night watching as it danced around the hillsides, at times moving as fast as one acre per second, buffeted by 80 mile-per-hour winds that carried ash in overhead rivers of fire.
We discovered beauty in the ashes. Not of our home...as not much was left there...but the ashes spread around our community. As friends and family rinsed the ash off of their cars and homes, they were compelled to pour out onto those who, like us, lost everything. We were humbled by the outpouring of support from family and friends
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