Winds and Memory

It’s the children who remember, the children who don’t forget.
Whenever there is wind, my five-year-old daughter asks if there will be fires. She wonders what would happen if she was asleep and there was a fire in the house. She wants to know what to do if there is a fire in her backyard. She hears the roar of a fire engine and wonders if there is smoke nearby.
I try to calm her as best I can, try to convince her that I have some sort of plan for these different scenarios. I try to make her believe that no matter what, I would never leave her.
But the truth is, I wasn’t with her when the Hill and Woolsey fires erupted in Thousand Oaks. She had spent the afternoon at my mother in law’s house in Oak Park, something she did every week. The winds were thick, the air so dry. When the Hill fire broke out near Newbury Park, I could see the smoke from my front yard. Flames began pouring down the hill behind my husband’s work and he immediately evacuated. Traffic was so terrible that he left his car near Target and walked the rest of the way home.
My mother in law and I decided that it was best she keep my daughter overnight. The 101 freeway was closed, traffic was congested, and the fire so close to our home. We may need to evacuate. Yes, I said. It’s safer if you keep her.
We were a community already reeling from the Borderline shooting just the night before. I felt the tangible fear of a mother who had two young daughters and how do I ever explain such tragedy to them? There wasn’t any time to process what had happened before the fires broke out. We as a community had to prepare to run again.
Later that night, the Woolsey fire spread over the land so incredibly fast towards Oak Park. My mother in law lives on one of the first streets to catch fire. She and my father in law woke up my daughter at midnight, telling her that it was just a little smoky outside and they want to be in clearer air. They didn’t tell her how close the flames were. They didn’t want to traumatize her. It’ll be one big sleepover, they said and grabbed my daughter and evacuated to my brother in law’s house, also located in Oak Park. Within an hour, they too were evacuated, my daughter along with them.
By this point, the Hill fire had moved away from our house and we were not in an evacuation zone. As my in laws drove my daughter towards my house, she saw the flames along the road, the fire trucks pacing the streets. She remembers the fear. She still speaks of that night, still asks when the fire will come for her.
I’ll never forget watching coverage of the fires on the news, seeing my in law’s street on the television. I’ll never forget the relief I felt when my mother in law pulled up to our house with my daughter in the car. I’ll never forget the sadness in my father in law’s eyes and the first words he spoke to me, Is my house still standing?
By 3 a.m. we had all of my husband’s immediate family staying with us because our home was the only place not in an evacuation zone. There were eight adults, five children, six dogs, two cats, one bird and one bearded dragon all staying in my 1300 square foot house. I spread blankets and pillows along the family room for the adults and along my daughter’s bedroom for the kids. I tried to sleep with my one year old, but while she snored against my chest, I was awake for most of the night. We all were.
Later in the week, I hosted a play date with some friends and their children at my house because what else can you do except practice normal? The smoke licked the back of Boney Mountain, a view so eerily beautiful from my backyard. Helicopters hovered in the distance. I remember the children playing, a pink dusk settling into the sky, the smoke illuminated, the children oblivious, and we mothers staring at a scene we never thought we’d see.
Thankfully, we are all ok. Our house is ok. My in law’s house, though portions burned, is ok. We are now approaching a year. But are we really ok? The sounds of bullets still echo in our ears. The smoke still settles into the hills behind our eyelids. Memory is like the wind, a force that comes and goes, sometimes when we least expect or want it to.
My daughter still fears the wind because she remembers. She remembers when the city she lived in experienced such tragedy. But I continue to tell her about our resilience. That is our memory now. Survival is our story.

Kelly N.