Approved!!!!!

by the Powers That Be (namely: Christopher at State Farm)

14 months after the fire, we were finally, finally granted our city permits and the bid approval / allowance of funds from our insurance to rebuild our home in Altadena.

We have been on rebuild zooms with our architect since APRILLLLLL of last year and have been driving to our contractor’s office in San Pedro to select flooring, tile, cabinetry, and appliances since last OCTOBERRRRR. For months, we have been swapping out colors and sizes for ones we like better, but it’s been like building a home out of Monopoly money (which the good people at Zia Tile probably won’t accept), purely the concept of potential funds that could arrive or could be rejected, because our insurance approval still hadn’t come through. Things are still tenuous, because we had hoped we could start the rebuild back last fall, then in January, and now it looks like we won’t be breaking ground until beginning of May. All of this means our ALE funds may well run out for our current rental before our Altadena house is finished being built, but at least things are now finally, finally moving in the right direction.

Rowan making a wish outside the house the first time we took him back to see the land (after the debris was cleared away by the Army Corps of Engineers; we didn’t want him to have this memory stuck in his head for the rest of his childhood…)

3 weeks after the Eaton fire

My Altadena mom friend broke ground on her house last week and I reached out to ask her how it felt. She said that she had so much emotional adrenaline that after helping dig the first ceremonious shovel-fuls with her kids, she passed out afterwards at home for two hours and woke up feeling so confused. What a total headfuck this has all been. Her builders confirmed that the soil in Altadena is wonderful: rich, wet, and earthy.

Something fun that I have routinely done my entire adult life is forget when I have hard-boiled eggs in a pot on the stove. The timer on the oven doesn’t work at this house and I always forget to set one on my phone, but to be fair I have done this in every house I’ve lived in. I set the eggs, feel unduly proud of myself for being anticipatory about my lunch and future kid snack needs, and then maybe 45 minutes later, I look up from working in my office, curious about the sounds of light gunshots coming from the other room. I was going to post a TW: Egg Horror Movie picture but it’s too gross to share.

But in our new home? Our new home will have a POT-FILLER (Okay, Nancy Meyers kitchen!) and a stove timer that works, I’ll simply never have this issue again. I won’t find pieces of exploded egg all over the ceiling and floor, another pot burnt to a crisp, having to open all the windows because the house is suddenly soaked in the rank smell of synthetic organofluorine chemical compounds!!!!!!!

I’d simply never be able to do that to a kitchen with this achingly beautiful Terra Rosa tile as the backsplash. In the new house, I’ll be made anew: Egg-timer-conscious. Swimming daily in my pool. Luxuriating on the mosaic bathroom tile floor. Hugging its arched doorways, grateful for their romantic, evocative shape. Each corner I’ll round, I’ll pinch myself, how lucky it is that we made it out alive, that we get to come back and watch it grow again, get to be custodians and watch our kids grow up, again, under its eaves. I’ll still be badgering Tyler about a third child (hm: some things won’t be different).

A vintage 1970s fit I scored on eBay that burned in the fire before I ever got the chance to wear it out of the house: deserves to be seen here, at least.

It’s been a weird in-between time. Something catastrophic happened, but now we have approval to move on ahead and go home, but around us, the world is full of very, very catastrophic things that are still happening: that have been happening a long time but that have gotten so, so much worse here at home, all around us. Every day, I feel the push and pull of California. I long to move back to England, long to pack it all in and move to a tiny island off of Greece, but then I think, what about my American Dream? When we moved to Santa Fe after the fire, I met a woman who had grown up in New Mexico. Trump had just done one of his thousands of unspeakably horrific things since he’d been in office, just a few months in at this point, and I said I wanted to get out of this country, to take my children and run. “I’ll never leave,” she said. “My people are here. My land is here. I’m not going anywhere.”

I thought I had never had such fealty to a place before, but I suppose that’s what I’m doing with Altadena. Part of me wanted to run, and did, temporarily, but now we are throwing all our exploded eggs into the basket of Altadena, rather than escaping Los Angeles due to climate change and egregious prices, like so many we know and love. California’s pull is too strong. My beautiful mountain landscape is there. My people are there - I loved and miss my Altadena community. My land is quite literally there. And so: we’re going home.

The mural I painted and the flowers I planted when I was so sick of strangely ceaseless months of gloomy weather in 2023 and needed bright colors to cheer me up.

I leave you with a little improv I actually didn’t end up using for my audition on a Big Doctor TV Show:

MISCELLANIA:

Speaking of disasters, I’m reading: Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens, a practically perfect novel that is going to be published in 3 months - you can pre-order your copy here!

I am currently OBSESSED with this song by blind Sierra Leonan kondi (thumb piano) player Sorie Konoma and American producer DJ Chief Boima. ENJOY. Play it loud. Dance around. Hug a dog. Kiss the inside of his ears and his cold little nose. Clean up the dog’s pee. Repeat.