a year post Carr Fire

I love to browse through books, especially free books presented lovingly, often times in little shelved cabinets; these sharing libraries built to withstand the weather, alongside the home of the owner, who, despite loving owning books, has realized that they have acquired so many that they weed out those for someone else who may enjoy the read.

As it happened, I picked up a biography called "Shelf Life," the story of an avid reader, turned author, who found herself working part time for a year in a bookstore.

When she describes, in twenty some-odd pages, her childhood and grammar school reading habits, it reminded me of my own, and how I read and logged so much during a school readathon that I read everything in the school library and a good many at the city library enroute to winning, what else, but a book, a fat compilation of stories that was inscribed by the librarian with a message to continue thirsting and seeking knowledge.

The reason I recall this, this memory made more poignant, is due to the fact that I left that heavy volume at my parents' home, the home I came of age in, then left to go to college, work, marriage, and family-raising; the home that was destroyed in the Carr Fire a short year ago.

I had a chance to visit the property recently when visiting my mom who continues to live in the area. Familiar and not so familiar plants are sprouting from the land amidst chipped up remnants of the trees that did not survive. Among the green and golden plants were deer droppings and quartz stones, and small pieces of the concrete stucco that was the exterior of the structure that was lived in by our family for forty years. We picked up a few stones to save, the jagged surface and patterns reflecting life's meanders and a solid reminder to be thankful always.

The sloping tree was my favorite one to climb and lounge on. The actual limb I sat on reached toward the edge of the house so was cut off many years after I moved away. The fuel tank was moved there after the fire. 

Update 2020: The San Francisco Chronicle media project 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside Northern California's Deadly Fire Tornado was a finalist for the 2019 Online Journalism Awards, but lost out to another project on another devastating fire in November 2018. The Camp Fire tore through the Feather River Canyon and obliterated the town of Paradise, near Chico, CA. Chico was where my mother evacuated to and stayed with friends for a few months before moving back to Redding. She rented a studio apartment at Holiday Hilltop Estates, an independent senior living community.