“There must be something,” she’d said.
“It’s gone, all gone.”
“Just find what you can.”
Climbing up the road a few hours later, I confirmed that every gleaming amenity in our newly remodeled house was ash.
Half a lifetime later, I see that fire as a turning point, not only a disaster. Though at the time it was one of the worst fires in California history, we had heroic firefighters to thank for the fact that almost everyone survived. And as we began, very slowly, to reconstruct our lives, I realized I could begin to live more simply, as I’d always wished to do. Coming so close to losing my life made losing my possessions a little easier to bear.
There was no escaping some memories. Reduced to nothing but a newly bought toothbrush, I could still feel myself sitting, helpless, in the car, watching the flames erase all my handwritten notes for my next three books and my next several years of writing — and with them, many of my lifelong dreams of being a writer. My mother felt she had lost her entire past and, in the autumn of her life, could not easily think of fresh beginnings.
As in the wake of a death, we then faced an Everest of paperwork. After we moved into a small apartment, it took us three and a half years before we could occupy a new home — much sturdier than the one we’d lost, but thunderously empty.
Yet when our insurance company offered to replace our belongings, I noticed that I could live happily without most of the books and clothes and pieces of furniture I’d accumulated. In some ways I felt lighter than before. I called my editor to tell him that all the books I’d promised him were no longer possible; after commiserating, he observed that perhaps I could write from memory and imagination now, from emotion, sources much deeper than my notes.
