On things we may have lost...
Trudy - that darned old truck that we both loved and hated, and which we had parked at our friend's house in Paradise for the summer.
Photographs - of friends no longer with us, of ancestors long-passed.
Familial objects - the owl lamp from my Grandma Workman; the barometer Grandma Witt gave to each of us grandkids in honor of our Grandpa.
Paintings - of places I've been, of places my mind has made up. Empty papers waiting for the brush to meet the page.
Letters - to each other, from each other, from family and friends.
Clothes - so, so many. Clothes that we meant to sort through this winter; clothes that were meant to be worn this winter because they were useless in summer. So many beautiful pairs of tights. My mother's wool pleated skirt. The dress she made me from the fabric I bought in Botswana.
Craft supplies - Fabrics, fabrics from places I've been, fabrics with plans and purposes that I hoped to put them to this winter. The sewing machine. Supplies for making candles - all the candles that were made.
Shoes - so many shoes. Fancy shoes. Expensive shoes. Shoes that aren't made anymore and you can only find on eBay if you're lucky.
Books - so many books. Hundreds of dollars of books. Books for school, books for pleasure, books that were purchased, and books that were presents.
Records - Jack's whole collection. Rather heat-sensitive, those are.
Bicycles - bicycles with histories. Matching cruisers, and the frame of the bike that Jack's great-grandfather rode to work every day.
Furniture - a bed, a cot, the sewing desk, the end tables (all but two). Some of the chairs for our kitchen table. We were fortunate to have gotten a good portion of our furniture out the weekend before.
Surfing gear - wetsuits, wax, and boards. All those trips I was planning for us to surf on the coast this winter - will they happen? will these have survived?
It's the not knowing that is the hardest part. The waiting. The realizing that our problems are small in comparison to those who have lost their homes as well as their possessions, who did not have the luxury of taking a trailer-full of their things out of town the week before, who have not been able to get in touch with their loved ones since they evacuated and are wondering if they're alright...
The things we know are saved:
Each other.
Our friends - evacuated or out-of-town.
A trailer-full of stuff: the essentials - mostly kitchen equipment, rugs, dressers, and shelves. A couch with a pull-out bed that I've appreciated sleeping on over our floor. The kitchen table - an heirloom from Jack's family. The "Buddha Shelf" - a box filled with special found objects from our time together - rocks, driftwood, feathers, old photographs, and other tokens.
All the things we each carried with us over the course of the summer - the daily needs that help us get through our lives, and a few sentimental items that we found space to squeeze into our cars this spring.
It's hard to say when we'll know if our storage unit survived. It's hard to say if we'll be allowed to go in to see it anytime soon. It's hard to know what kind of condition our things will be in. Will they be untouched in their metal building, surrounded by pavement? Will they be utterly destroyed by this wildfire that grew 80 football fields every minute? Or will they be in some gooey melted-rubbermaid mess of in-between? I'm not sure what to expect. I'm not sure what to hope for. The worst could be felt as both a terrible pain and the relief of a burden.
This is the uncertainty of waiting.
And waiting..
And waiting...
And....
Until next time-
