How do I talk about what we lost in the fire?

It is never "just stuff" and it is always "just stuff"

Hi Othertonguers,

It’s good to be back, though I am writing under drastically changed circumstances since my oddly prescient last newsletter. Of course, I did not want the previous year to literally burn down, but that is what we got. As you will read below, Kevin and I had moved on December 3rd from London into my parents’ pied-a-terre in Pacific Palisades. My sister, brother-in-law, and niece lived across the street and we were living a version of heaven. On January 7th, the fire broke out at the very top of the hill in our neighborhood. We were very lucky to get out at the beginning of the evacuation before the smoke became viscous and people had to abandon their cars. Everyone is safe, everyone is scarred.

It took me a while to corral thoughts and feelings about what happened in something that could be considered a newsletter. That is what you’ll find in the essay below—a meager jumble of thoughts in the face of immeasurable tragedy. When I look at photos from the days before everything burned to the ground or remember the way we lived before, I am struck by what I now see as necessary hubris required to live daily life. One cannot live constantly fearing their home will turn to ash in a matter of hours. I wish, though, that I had realized how real that possibility was as I packed to leave that house for the last time.

Why write at all about something I am still processing? Well, I have always attempted to write even as the narrative is still unfolding, to allow writing as a mode of process, and to bring that to this space. Thanks for reading, and an extra special thanks to those of you who contributed to our Amazon registry to help Kevin and me get back on our feet (and to those who also supported my sister’s family, too).

Thank you, thank you. Words cannot express our gratitude for your support.

-Lindsay

It is strange to see what remains. Photo credit: Joel Pollak

Is there such a thing as “just stuff?”

I. A few examples of my condition

I do not have the healthiest attachment to stuff. It has always felt like a literal extension of me—vital appendages that make me feel settled. (Some may call it baggage, but I think it’s more than that—an appreciation for the way the physical becomes imbued with the intangible.) This condition explains many silly things I’ve done, including my moving every thing I own to Berlin in 2018 rather than do the smarter thing and move it into storage in New York while I figured my life out. When I had to move back to the US only months later, I put everything in storage there, only for nearly four years to pass before I returned to Germany. I justified moving back to Berlin by saying “but my stuff is there.” My heart. Part of my body. I even joke that I wouldn’t be with my husband if it weren’t for this…shall we say…“passionate” attachment to stuff, which brought me back to Berlin.

Exhibit A: After I’d moved back to Berlin in 2022 and Kevin and I officially moved in together, I scheduled the arrival of everything I’d stored years before. The boxes held so much I’d longed to be reunited with: favorite clothes I wished I’d packed, art that my grandmother had painted, and all the kitchen items I’d used to develop the recipes in my first cookbook. But there was so much stored that belied the dark reality of my consumption: an inexplicable collection of plastic barbershop combs (something I’ve never used on my thick, unwieldy hair), sprinkles I’d collected over the years of decorating sugar cookies, and many years-expired credit cards that could have simply been cut up and discarded.

Exhibit B: The November before last, I was wearing a scarf my mom had bought for a birthday a few years ago on the way home from LSE. The tube was searingly hot, as per, and so I unwrapped the scarf and placed it on my lap. Truth be told, I’d had a few wines at the campus pub, so I wasn’t as alert as might have been ideal. The second the train doors closed behind me on the platform, I realized the scarf was gone. I rushed up to the attendant at the station entrance and asked if they could radio ahead to the next station and check the car I’d been in. The guy humored my panic at first, clearly thinking “It’s just a scarf, lady,” but said there was nothing to do but see whether it showed up in lost and found. I left the station (and maybe bought some consolation cheese from M&S?) and walked home, where I collapsed in heaving sobs. I couldn’t get over it: How did I so stupidly not realize the scarf was on my lap? It meant so much to me, this square of wool, only because my mom gave it to me. And this was only one scarf.

Exhibit C: During my twenties and early thirties, I wrote obsessively in journals. I thought of these as my life’s work. Even though they weren’t intended to be shown to anyone at all, I saw them as proof of my becoming not a writer and of my growing up. I moved them around with me, wanting access to this externalized past-brain, feeling that they contained potential. Sometime in the past five years, I began to worry that something might happen to them. Then, on a podcast, a host discussed purchasing a fire-proof safe for her home, and I realized this was the perfect thing for my journals. For whatever reason, I didn’t do it, but I thought about it here and there, in moments of transposed anxiety. One day, I’d buy the fire-proof safe. When I left Seattle to move back to Berlin three years ago, I boxed them up and placed them in my parents’ garage in LA. At least there they’d be in a good place, I thought.

II. Reader, I never bought the fire-proof safe

The week after the fire, I have to get back to the 10 articles that were due the week before. I have no space to process, to think. I avoid images of the fire or pictures of the house before the fire. But at night when I lie awake, sentences start forming my head. I feel I have to write something about the experience even as it resists narrative form.

In a new document, I jot fragments, like “the smoke is our stuff in the sky.” Deadline behind me, I begin to write this essay, telling myself I have to accept what I can get from my frazzled brain, which amounts to fragments, jottings. The language feels clunky and forced; deadened and numb. I am not in a place to let the prose lean poetic. When I have read attempts to talk about the fires in beautiful language, I balk. There is not beauty in what happened.

III. That morning

Two Tuesday ago, at 10:43am, I was trying to write an article about winter salads for a client, when a text came in from my brother-in-law to our sibling and spouse group text. “I’m hearing about a fire in the highlands?” We jokingly call him Weatherman Steve because he is on top of the meteorological news. At the same moment, Kevin shared a photo of the fire from his walk in a nearby neighborhood. “This is from the bluffs so not a million miles away,” he wrote.

I tried writing another sentence about the unexpected joys of a salad made with bitter greens like radicchio, but my heart was beating too fast to focus. At 11:06am, I sent an email to my editor: “There is a fire that has broken out very close to the house, so I am going to need to focus on this for the moment. Will do my best to get work done, but will be a chaotic day or two as this develops.” I both cannot believe I suggested I continue working and recognize the paranoia that precarious freelance life has instilled in me.

I started grabbing the essentials—our supplements, my computer, clean workout clothes, my toiletries, our passports, the stuff I keep by the bedside. I ran out of the house to see if I could see Kevin on the street. He wasn’t there. I ran back in to the house to keep packing when he arrived. “We have to go,” I said. We rushed around—I can’t remember much of what happened. I looked in the closet and saw my jewelry organizer, which had every piece of jewelry that means anything to me from my entire life. “It will fall out if I throw it in the bag,” I thought, and shut the door.

“Go help your sister,” Kevin told me, “I’ll pack the car.” I ran across the street to help her grab a few things for herself, her husband, and her baby. Their nanny was doing dishes and a tray of warm roasted broccoli sat on the stovetop grates. While my sister grabbed suitcases and their essentials, I sprinted from their front door to her car trunk, shoving things in the back carelessly. The smoke was black and pouring over our heads in a thick torrent. I called Kevin just as a text from him arrived. “We have to go,” we each said. My sister put her daughter in the carseat, I took their dog, and we started driving at 11:22am to our first evacuation zone. It took two hours to get to the second evacuation location (the first idea having been discarded as we drove–that house has since burned down, too). There, we split up, as that house was too near the danger zone, and Kevin and I went to his old coworker’s place in Venice, where we stayed for four days before flying to my parents’ house in Wyoming. We are here for the foreseeable future, an absurd term, of course, but one we must adopt.

IV. What became ash

But how to talk about what we lost in the fires?

The day of our move from London (3 suitcases not pictured)

Though I grew up in Pacific Palisades, I haven’t lived there full-time since I was 13. And yet, in the way that childhood stamps our minds indelibly, it feels like home. The bursts of bougainvillea, the spiky aloe plants, the towering palm trees, the dusty smell of dirt beneath dry eucalyptus leaves, the light that filters through sycamore leaves—all these things form the sights and smells of my oldest memories. When my sister and brother-in-law moved to the Palisades in 2020 and my parents bought the nearby house the following year (my brother-in-law clocked the jog between front doors at a brisk six seconds), I took every opportunity to be there for long stretches. I’ve written many times from both houses, houses which are both gone.

When Kevin and I left London on December 3^rd, we checked 10 suitcases and brought two carry ons with us. This was no small amount (as you can see in the photo above), but as someone who experiences stuff as an extension of the soul, it seemed paltry. We selected everything that seemed essential to have with us in the nine or so months before we’d be reunited with the rest of our things from London. Every piece of clothing that mattered, my research books, my recipe developing kit, the purse I bought for myself when I sold my first book, the backpack I bought for myself when I sold my second. Moving to LA was a decision to help us in a liminal phase. My parents were letting us stay in their small house there, a place we could live rent-free while figuring out next steps. I am a freelancer with precarious income and Kevin is looking for a new job, so we were extremely grateful for this set up, which offered ready-made community with people we love so much.

My parents lost a house, my sister and brother-in-law quite literally everything. Their loss was comprehensive, from the metaphor of home and the community they’d built to the objects that represented memories like my niece’s first Christmas to the mundane like hand towels and old jars. This stuff is not “just stuff.” We know this. And yet, many people offer this phrase as consolation. And I get it. Comparatively, Kevin and I have lost very little. It was just those 12 bags, plus the things we’d bought since moving to LA, plus everything I’d left in the garage after leaving Seattle three years ago, plus everything I’d handwritten in the last 15 years. It was “just stuff.”

When discussing this with a friend, she pointed out the absurdity of living in a consumer society that tells us that all meaning resides in objects, in the promise of the purchase. Then, when these things are taken, we are offered the platitude of “just stuff.”

Maybe, though, there are people who can walk away from a house on literal fire and feel fine knowing that they looked at all the jewelry that they collected over a lifetime, thinking “it will be a hassle if it falls out of that shitty organizer I bought,” only to realize it is all just ash in the air now, having landed in someone else’s garden, a once-pearl dusting some Venice cacti. The necklace I bought for my sister’s wedding. The necklace my mother-in-law gave me for my wedding that was her own mother’s, which I wore nearly every day since then. Every pair of earrings my mom has given me over my life. One of two matching rings I bought for my sister and me. Sister rings, we called them. Amber-colored glass ovals that hung on dainty hooks that my mom let me have because she knew I loved wearing them. (I am crying writing this, if you’re wondering.) The bracelet that was my grandmother’s that I’d taken to wearing daily, stacked above my watch. The opal ring that was hers, too, that was equal parts gaudy and lovely.

These things have meaning, they signify, they remain when people can’t.

V. It is also “just stuff”

By now, it is perhaps no surprise to you that I wanted everything we could manage to move from London with us as we navigated the major life changes ahead. With an international move, you don’t know how long the shipping will take, and we didn’t yet have a final place to send it. I remember when we piled the suitcases in the center of the living room so the cleaners could work around them, Kevin looked at me and said, “I hate bringing this much stuff with us. We should have stored more.” I texted the picture above to a friend that I knew would be sympathetic. “That’s not bad at all considering you’re moving two lives!!” She wrote. I agreed, feeling smug.

I’ve written before about the strange modern condition of caring about tragedies that are both physically remote and impossible to change, and how the contemporary media diet immobilizes us with a moral imperative to stay informed (which profits major news organizations). And yet, I am grateful for the attention and care that we and others have received because this was national news. However, the news cycle moves on, the fires move below the digital fold, and now (understandably) attention is funneled toward the very real political nightmare in our country. Two weeks is a long time to remain newsworthy, but for so many, the trauma is only sinking in now that shock has worn away. As the attention subsides, it leaves the true hard part in its wake, especially for people who lost their home along with their belongings (and here is where I never doubt for a second that Kevin and I got out lucky).

So while it may not be appropriate to point out to someone who has just lost so much that it is “just stuff,” there is truth in that point. Yes, these things meant a lot to me and reminded me of important people in my life, but I have the luck to know those people still exist. My heart breaks that we will never be in those spaces together in that same way again. I will never sink into the comically large couch across the street as I bounce my niece on my knees while doing a silly scat voice, we won’t sit at the garden table eating pizzas made my brother-in-law, and my sister and I won’t rendezvous with our dogs in the middle of the quiet street for a few walks around “the loop.” That version of that place is gone, as are countless meaningful and mundane items along with them. We have our memories, we have photos to jog them, but most importantly—and I hope never to lose sight of this in the face of the physical loss—we still have each other.

What was the garage (and the bags of “just stuff”). Photo credit: Joel Pollak

I’ll be back next time with my new recipe for Chicken Thighs with Creamy Kale, Bacon, and Potatoes. Thanks for supporting Othertongue, it’s good to have you here.