blackened skies

I've not talked much about the fires in California, mostly because it's hard to find the words. I grew up in one of the tiny mountain towns that has burned so viciously over the past week. A town of under 2000 people, a town of mountain men and snow and one or two roads off the hill. Seeing pictures of it burning, hearing that one, two, now three old friends have lost their homes, wondering if the home I grew up in all those years ago survived or if it too burned into the ashen sky.

Growing up in those mountains was a mix of redneckery, small town gossip, loyal neighbors and another kind of fire and brimstone. I hated it at the time, the long distance from the real world, the cold, the forever digging ourselves out of the snow. But it was something else too; small town safe, the place where everyone had to get their mail at the post office and the market down the road had the best candy. A place spent climbing trees and building forts, long school bus rides and four wheel driving. It's also where I learned to play baseball and where I learned to drive, where I had my first job and my first broken heart.

And now it's burned. It would be impossible not to know the names of folks whose homes have burned, even 20 years gone I still know. And in one week it's changed forever, the landscape blackened, the town grew smaller and wider still.

Posessions are just trappings. Clever disguises to keep us from knowing our ultimate selves. But they are also how we define our safety, where we lay our heads. We cleave to these things, to these tangible markers of our memories and then one day they fail us and gone, all gone.

And then we start anew. The courageous mountain men and women living there will find this as their beginning rather than their end. I know this because it's hardscrabble living in those hills and the weak wouldn't choose it. But clearing away the charred rubble of their lives until now is a solemn task at best.