I guess I’ve been writing about the fire that destroyed our home and our neighborhood in the Oakland Hills for almost twenty years now. I just spent a year writing about it for my master’s thesis.
That’s a lot of words.
Sometimes pictures do a better job of telling the story, so there will be pictures…
I’ve sort of dreaded getting to this part of my story, knowing all along when I started this year-long blog project I’d be writing about how I lost my house–and then BAM!–turned 40 just a couple of weeks later. I lost my home and my youth in nearly one fell swoop,adding insult to injury. (But it provided me with the opportunity to use “one fell swoop” in a sentence–twice.)
This is what happened in 1991: picking it up after my dreadful term of office as PTA president came to an end in June, when James celebrated his birthday.
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| James blows out five candles |
He got to come along to Hawaii with Mom and Dad while the older kids went away to summer camp.
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| Hangin’ loose on Maui |
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We had a wonderful trip, and got to watch the big deal solar eclipse on TV because it was so overcast you couldn’t really see anything. Oh well.
We did get to see the Seven Sacred Pools–and two ordinary ones– at least.
After Hawaii, we took our usual family vacation at Donner Lake.
We got back home to Oakland just before school started.
So far, so good.
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| First day of school for everyone: James starts kindergarten! |
September…
October…
And then: the fire. Ours was one of over 3,000 homes that were destroyed in just a few hours on a hot, windy Sunday.
Here is what we found when we were allowed back into the neighborhood after October 20:
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| View from the street. Our mailbox survived somehow. |
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| The tree, without the tree house. |
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| It may look like a junkyard, but this is our collapsed house. Clothes dryer in the foreground. |
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| Looking downhilll to the street. Bed springs, rebar, the metal boxes that used to be appliances: all that was left.. |
