In 1991 my ex-husband’s Oakland house burned down when I was walking around in San Francisco on Valencia Street with my friends. Pages of burnt books were falling on our heads. By the time we made it to Market and Castro there was a big TV store and through the street store window we could see all the fancy TVs. Every single one of them had live footage of the Oakland Hills burning.

Not long after that, I married my husband and moved to the new house in the Oakland Hills. The winds get very strong up here and when they get violent, the electrical company turns off the electricity and we get loud alerts on our phone. An alert is what you get before you get an evacuation notice. The alert says “hey, you might get evacuated!” more or less.

I don’t just have a ‘go bag’ I have it all figured out. I know what I can get in my Honda Fit and how I would pile it in there. I’ve got it written out because I know from my friends who’ve been through this; it takes 20 minutes before you get that evacuation notice and your house is burned to the ground.

I am now watching from Northern California some of the most expensive real estate in the world burn to the ground in southern California. L.A. City of the Angels. Pacific Palisades before and after images resemble Gaza and Ukraine. The whole entire thing looks like fiction. Except it’s horrifically real, and happening to people and places I know.

I heard of one man who is an artist like me. He is in his early 80s and did not want to lose his life’s work. Mostly he had accepted the situation. However, just one painting he wanted to save so he walked out of the house with it and the hurricane level winds used it as a sail to lift him high in the sky, and then drop him down breaking a few ribs.

I heard another story where a newsreporter was interviewing a woman who couldn’t talk for her sobs watching her house about to burn. She was most distressed because she had chickens and ducks in the backyard. The cameraman took pity on her and ran back there and got as many chickens and ducks out of that backyard as he could before the thing went up.

Holding a saved chicken, she could then talk a little bit. She held onto that chicken as if it was keeping her alive. Funny thing though, most people eat chickens.