Altadena

Friends of mine used to have a piece of driftwood that they found once while camping. It was rectangular, with a little square hole in one corner. On one side, in the center, the remains of a branch had broken off, and had left slightly raised cylinder. In short, it looked like a camera. They called it their "mind's eye camera," and posited that whenever they looked at something through the square hole, the view finder of their imaginary camera, they'd remember it forever.

Their house burned in the Eaton fire, and though I don't know for sure, I'm pretty certain that their mind's eye camera burned with it.

In the spirit of that camera, here are snapshots of what I remember fiercely in my head, but that no longer exist in Altadena.

Because I am who I am and because I notice what I notice, let's start with lost trees.

• 100+ year old Fuerte avocado trees. Though the Fuerte avacodo was discovered in Mexico, it was first cultivated in Altadena, and the old trees were tall and bore huge crops. The broad trees punctuated a few streets and quite a few yards. A person could be rich in avocados with one of these trees that had survived Prohibition, Depression, droughts, frosts and even snow, suburban blight and suburban renewal. 
• The large-blossomed quince tree of someone who loved Altadena so deeply, she hiked all of its streets and told tales about it. During its life, a hairless cat, a wise Boxer, and a sweetly mild Labrador all had taken turns resting in its shade.
• A longan—yes, a longan!—tree that seemed remarkably far away from its tropical home, but still bore leather-coated sweet fruit. My brother and I once climbed deep into this tree and harvested what we could, some to eat right away, and some for my brother to bring to his New Mexico home. It's still the only time I've ever eaten longan, in a place where it was a surprise.
• A line of old, feathery pepper trees. Many good things, and some heartbreak too, happened behind those gnarled pepper trees. Also behind them, a mango tree, fed with dishwater and manure and kept warm by the home's reflected heat, occasionally bore prized fruit.
• A bountiful loquat. This tree greeted each visitor to a home where Octavia Butler once met with a Black women's book club, while the group talked about her book, Parable of the Sower, a book that imagines Altadena and Los Angeles on fire.
• The cedar tree in the shade of which, on a searing summer day, someone dear told me her previously unspoken desire: I want a child, she told me. I want to be a mother.

And now, some rooms that could never exist exactly again the way they once did.

• A tiny, turreted room at the top of the stairs of a 1920's Spanish stucco where someone once sat, away from her beloved children, to write surprising, warm, and defiant short fiction. 
• A square, dirty-white room, slick with the funk of beer, anchored by a large sticky oak round table, and brightened by neighborhood laughter. 
• A dining room where two people who love each other hung elementary school portraits of themselves in just the right position so that the two childhood versions of the adults appeared to gaze at one another. Also in this room, a collection of Rothko prints, all the colors in those fuzz-edged blocks. Walk out of this room, through the kitchen with a freezer full of ice cream, and pass a pile of marathon ribbons, too many to count, on your way out of the house to . . .
• A workshop of every hobbyists' dreams: saws, sanders, grinders, fans, vacuums, belts, a 3-D scanner and a 3-D printer, a do for every dad. Here, my friend helped me build a wide, walnut frame for a painting. The frame we built together still is as smooth as a satin pillow, and hangs now in San Francisco.
• A white office with high ceilings, drafting tables, a funny retro refrigerator, and a career's worth of architectural landscape drawings.

There is so much more that lives in my head, some of it gone before the fire, but most of it lost last month. The place that has lived so vividly in my memory will have to stay there. It feels selfish to weep over these rooms and places that weren't mine, that were the museums of others' lives, but I have wept. It feels selfish to cry when the Altadena house, where I used to live on the edge of the canyon still stands. Yet the house alone wasn't my Altadena. My heart has broken over the loss of my Altadena and loss of the Altadena for all those who loved it.

But today, my friend who lived in the house with the childhood portraits sent me two photos of things he found sifting through ashes of the home he and his wife shared. They are two real photos, not mind's eye photos.

First, an intact pot that I made for him years ago. The glaze is pocked by the heat, but the pot is in one piece, and most of it still gleams.

Second, his hand, and on it what he had thought he had lost: his wedding ring.