That time of the year

Yes, that's right. Time for palm trees to get their annual trim. And, more significantly, FIRE SEASON. The sky is orange, and the light is weird and heavy. Everything seems overly lit with an orangish tinge; since the grass is brown and dry, it seems to glow, firelike. Eerie, very eerie. Even the brown trunks of trees glow in this light. Three years ago a fire was almost started in the canyon by my house..... now every year when fire season rolls around, I can't help but feel apprehensive - getting stuff together and out of the house and far, far away from the mountains is an ordeal. Flash back 12 years, when my parents and I first moved to this house; we had just gotten all the furniture and boxes moved, but nothing was unpacked. At around 3:00 in the morning my mother came and woke me up, bringing me into her bedroom. "Look out there," she said, and pointed across the canyon to four small, separate blazes on the mountainside. We stood there, my mom and my dad and I, watching the fire grow until it became apparent that it was out of control. And then, in a panick, we threw what we could find from the boxes easiest to reach into the car; I was crying for my books, so my mother tore through boxes till she reached one with a few books at the top, grabbed them, and pushed them with me into the car. My dad set the sprinkler on the lawn, and we sped out of the yard.

I remember having a dream that night in which the hotel we stayed in towered over the mountains; I looked down from the top story at the mountains far below, as they burned.

It's funny, though, I feel sort of immune to the fires, possibly because of that 1994 fire; it jumped the canyon less than a mile south of my house, and only about a quarter mile north, and it didn't get my house. Three years ago someone tried to start a fire in the canyon, and it wouldn't take (it didn't help that it had just rained, and that the guy stuck around till the sheriffs came).

But I still make that little mental inventory every fall of what I'm going to grab if we ever need to evacuate.

Labels: california

posted by Holly @ 4:40 PM