One Year Later, We're Back in Our Palisades Home
Forever changed.
I’m sitting on my favorite couch in the world in our home in the Palisades. The sun hasn’t come out yet, so all I can see are the twinkling lights of the city below us. I didn’t think I’d ever get back here. So many neighbors and friends weren’t as blessed. But finally, after a year, here I am. Changed, like the devastation around me. But here.
Exactly one year ago, Kyle and I were in this exact same spot. The kids had left to spend the second week of vacation with their dad and we were still adjusting to the quiet.
As Kyle and I were falling asleep after a New Year’s Eve celebration, I whispered, “If there was a fire, what would we do? Would we go in the pool?”
We woke up an hour later to a bright light being shined in our faces, a loud noise outside. What the —? I jumped out of bed and ran to the window. It was a helicopter. Literally right outside.
“Kyle! Get up!”
The helicopter danced in the sky, twirling like a ballerina, as we quickly processed what was happening. I checked my phone and saw missed texts from my sister-in-law warning me about a fire in our neighborhood.
“Check the fire app!”
There was a fire a mile away. Kyle suggested we head outside to see what was going on. It was too late; I was already in my closet throwing a few things into a suitcase including my passport, wallet, and laptop. I zipped it so quickly, an arm of one of my favorite sweaters was caught halfway out.
“Let’s go! We have to get out! Pack a bag!”
I was in flight mode. Meanwhile the helicopter kept illuminating the bedroom. My heart was pounding. All I could think was “go, go, go.”
We raced downstairs, our suitcases banging on the stairs, the sound outside deafening and disconcerting, and opened the garage door to leave. One neighbor was climbing up the hill. We looked to the right and saw a firetruck, lights flashing.
“Let’s just go,” I said again.
“Honey, let’s see what’s going on first,” Kyle said. We could see the fire just over the ridge.
We drove downhill in the dead of night and went to my brother’s house to sleep, although I didn’t really sleep. Luckily, by the time the sun came up, the fire was out. Watch Duty reported it 100% contained.
“I’m still glad we left,” I said, making the bed at my brother’s and getting ready to come back home, feeling a bit foolish about my insistence on our dramatic exit.
When we got back home, my closet said it all. The jammies on the floor. The drawers still open. I hadn’t been sure I’d ever see any of it again. Thank God, I thought. Thank God. I felt shaken for days, fear for our safety lodged in my chest long after the threat was extinguished.
“How crazy that you said that right before we went to sleep,” Kyle said the next day. “You had a premonition.”
“I guess so,” I said, looking at the sweeping mountains around us. “Crazy.”
Within days, we were back in New York, the kids starting school after the holidays. I was on a Zoom in my dining room when Kyle called my cell from his temporary production office in New Jersey with the team on “Late Fame,” the movie he was about to shoot (which is coming out in 2026). I silenced the call. But then he called back, which he never does. I muted the Zoom for a moment and picked up.
“We’re going to lose our house! We’re going to lose our house!” Kyle was near tears, hysterical.
“What?!” Another fire?
He was watching on our Nest cameras as what became the biggest fire in L.A. history enveloped our home, flames the height of our house shooting up from behind the pool. The next few hours went by in a blur. Somehow Kyle and his business partner Ethan, whose wife and baby were in L.A., came back to our apartment where we stayed up most the night watching the coverage. We didn’t know if our home had survived. How could this happen??
Of course, then it got so much worse. The entire community and town were demolished along with the devastation in Altadena.
We found out days later that our home had survived. A guy on a bike on a neighborhood app was driving up and down streets in the Palisades and we caught a glimpse of it. And yet.
The pain of what the community went through in the aftermath of the fire is unfathomable. The scale of what I saw when we came back a few weeks later to survey the scene was, well, there are no words big enough.
Scenes from those days will always stay with me. The old man standing shocked in a hazmat suit on the pile of rubble that used to be his home, looking down, not moving. The family hugging at what was their front door. The lone chimneys. The steel beams where the grocery store used to be. The streets with our favorite stores, gone. The homes of our friends and where we would take our regular walks, gone.
As it turned out, firefighters had arrived on the scene at our home early on. After tracking them down on Instagram where we shared footage of their brave actions (thanks to all the firefighters’ wives and friends who helped us find them), we spoke to them — and said thank you.
Apparently, our neighborhood was their first call of the day. They used our garden hoses to put out the fire that had raced along our property line, scorching all our plants and hedges, pergola and outdoor furniture, our shed on the other side, surrounded. They put it all out and saved our home and all our immediate neighbors’ homes, but then the flames had come back in the footage we recorded. It was just fate that saved those from engulfing our home.
We were so lucky. Kind of.
It took a year to put our home back together. The outside needed to be refurbished, retiled, replaced. The soil, contaminated, needed to be dug up, all new dirt and grass in its place. The inside of our home needed multiple rounds of ServPro to get out all the smoke, soot, remnants and ash, every piece of furniture cleaned twice, rugs replaced, clothes boxed up. The speakers and wires outside completely melted, the furniture burned. Everything was eventually replaced.
At first, the mountains were so barren that when I saw them, I couldn’t stop crying. It felt like we were on a different planet.
I didn’t think we’d ever be able to move back in. I mourned the loss of what had been our happiest place on earth. I felt embarrassed by how completely traumatized I was given that we still had our home — and that it wasn’t even our primary residence. And yet. Our village. Our neighborhood. The land. The wildlife. I still can’t believe that something like this could actually happen, that the systems in place, like available water to fight fires, failed us all.
I will never feel truly safe again. It was an illusion anyway.
As it turned out, that fire last New Year’s Eve was arson. It was intentional. One man who set a fire for fun with intent to destroy who could have killed us that first night had firefighters not come, had we not woken up. It was that fire that, a week later, with hurricane winds, turned into the biggest fire ever. And someone did that. Evil knows no bounds.
I had come up to the house many times in the past year and told Kyle I didn’t think I’d ever be able to stay here again. How could I? How could we bring back joy, family, and life to an area so devastated around us? Unthinkable.
And yet. Miraculously, those barren mountains are now covered in a green so bright it looks like they’re in a Disney movie. It doesn’t even look real. And it’s December. I don’t remember them ever being this green before. It’s like a shag carpet draped over all the hills.
The town and surrounding area have been cleared. No more beams. No more piles of rubble. No more army corps standing sentry at the entrance to our neighborhood. Now, houses are being rebuilt. Wooden frames, which will become homes, dot the landscape. Some stores are open in the village. Plots that held family homes now have construction signs.
If you tried to fool yourself, you could almost pretend it was undiscovered land being built for the first time. Pioneers, not survivors. Lights are on in the apartments on Sunset. Holiday decorations twinkle in front yards. It isn’t the same, of course. It never will be. But there is life. There is joy. There is hope.
I drove up the hill yesterday to move back in. Kyle had assured me the house was ready. That it would be okay. He’d spent the past year with a devoted team nursing our home and land back to life. I’d wanted to abandon it. Kyle had insisted it would come back, that we couldn’t leave it. It was injured and needed our help. I was pessimistic. He had nothing but hope.
As I drove up, my phone connected to my car and I accidentally pushed a button on Apple Music that shuffled all my songs and played tunes I hadn’t even realized I’d downloaded. As I turned onto the street off Sunset that I would climb until I reached our home, a song from “The Greatest Showman” blasted out called “From Now On.”
I turned up the volume. Goosebumps. The universe at work.
And we will come back home
And we will come back home
Home again
And we will come back home
And we will come back home
Home again
We slept here last night for the first time in exactly a year. I brushed my teeth at my bathroom sink as if nothing had happened and yet so much has happened, so much has been lost. I climbed into bed — our same sheets! our same mattress! — and looked down at the twinkling stars surrounded by verdant hills and homes being rebuilt.
The natural world is stronger than I could’ve ever imagined. It survived the devastation and came back even more beautiful. Plants. Trees. Grass. Hills. It all grew back. Not the same. But better. I appreciate it all so much more now. Crazy to think of tiny me, standing on the edge of it all, doubting the land months ago, to now, with it all blasting to perfection.
I’m on my couch writing. The sun is finally peeking over the hills. The ocean glimmering in its morning slumber. I’m not the same, of course. The breeze yesterday had my hackles up. Could the wind cause another fire as bad as the last one? Are we safe?
No. None of us are really ever safe. And yet we rest on the land and pray and hope that we’re given a little more time in the beauty of the universe, that the rage doesn’t come for us directly, so we can marvel in the magic of the moment.
We are changed.
But we are home again.
Note: I’ll be sharing essays like this weekly with Z.I.P. members (Zibby’s Important People).
It's truly awe-inspiring, isn't it, to witness nature regenerate? Sometimes it can be infuriating when you're grieving to see crocus bloom in the snow, as if how dare the world carry on when you're hurting. Other times it's reassuring to know hope can exist in sorrow. I'm glad you're home.
I'm so happy you are finally home! I know you tried a few months ago and it didn't work for you. I was thinking about what you said about the mountains before the fire and now currently green and glowing. It reminds me of something I hung onto during the pandemic when there were so many unknowns. Nature just does her thing regardless of what is going on. Seasons change, leaves fall, there is constant regrowth. I'm happy you are experiencing that. I hope you connect with your neighbors soon.❤️