My House Burned in the L.A. Fires. What Happens Now?

"I grew up moving, so often that I sometimes lost count: New Jersey, Ohio, London, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hong Kong by the time I was eighteen. When I left New York to join my soon-to-be husband, Billy, in Los Angeles, at the beginning of 2005, it occurred to me that I had never lived anywhere longer than seven years."

"In a forgetful, self-erasing city like Los Angeles, the Palisades prized its history and its sense of place. The town was founded in the nineteen-twenties by a community of utopia-minded Methodists. An old map indicates what the early residents thought of their chosen site, with regions marked as the Land of Milk and Honey and the Garden of the Gods. The threat of fire-the dark side of those mountains and the wind-was seemingly ignored. The community's pitch for growth was "Bring the children here.""

Frequent childhood moves encompassed New Jersey, Ohio, London, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hong Kong by age eighteen. A move from New York to Los Angeles in 2005 began continued neighborhood relocations until settling in Pacific Palisades in 2019 with a spouse and two children. Pacific Palisades sits on a bluff between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains, about ten extra minutes from central Los Angeles. The community originated in the 1920s with utopia-minded Methodists, adopted idyllic map labels, overlooked mountain fire risks, and later attracted artists and European intellectuals.

Read at The New Yorker