Uprooted

Trying to Move Back to the Palisades After 8 Months

I sat in the driveway and cried. I couldn’t do it.

This was supposed to be the weekend Kyle and I moved back into our home in the Palisades after the fire. Over the past few weeks, our contractor, Joe, and his team of workers had been finalizing all the repairs, replacing our burned balcony with a new blue and white tile floor, stripping and refinishing the table and pergola in the backyard that charred, resuscitating the singed garage doors. Our AV guy, Max, had carefully snaked new wires underground, the old ones melted beyond recognition. Our gardener had removed all the old plants and grass — everything outside had been decimated. His team had planted fresh sod, sprinkling new dirt in the now empty flower beds.

The lawn on which I’d hosted dinner parties with string lights overhead, where our dear friends had gotten married, where my kids had played soccer and done cartwheels and jumped on the trampoline, and where dogs we loved had pounced and played, wasn’t the same. But it was getting there.

Our insurance company had professionally cleaned the contents inside our home, sending out everything upholstered to a heavy duty outfit that would restore it all. The carpets on which piles of ash had drifted down through the cracks in our skylights had been steamed. Our furniture, which we’d been using in our temporary spot in Santa Monica, had been loaded back onto a moving truck, driven up the steep, still-scorched-hill to our home, past empty lots that used to boast beautiful homes, and unloaded, carried in and plunked down right where it all used to be. Our beds were made with our “old” linens. Everything was theoretically ready.

On Friday morning, I woke up in Santa Monica after landing at 1:30 am, and hastily repacked my suitcase after rummaging through it to get dressed for my early morning appearance on “Good Day, L.A.” As Kyle drove us from home to the studio and then to my bookstore, the suitcase slid around the trunk, reminding me of the excitement to come. We were going home!

Later, in the parking lot behind my store, I grabbed a new outfit and left the suitcase unzipped, my socks and sweaters spilling out into the trunk, as I changed for my KTLA interview at the bookshop.

Kyle went over early Friday to oversee everything. He’d been managing the whole process since the fire, going up regularly, taking charge of all of it as he lovingly nursed the home back to life. I’d been too upset to spend time there since the fire. The three times I’d gone made me feel like I was in an alternate universe, our home suddenly plunked down in what looked like a war zone. Even the air inside, although filtered and Serv-Pro’d to perfection, didn’t smell right. Nothing felt right. But I was confident that by now, September, eight months after the fire, it would be okay. On social media from across the country, I’d watched as the Rec Center opened, as images flashed of select restaurants opening back up, the CVS ready for customers. Why shouldn’t we move back? We missed it desperately. It was time. It — and I — would be ready.

And yet, I wasn’t.

Before

After

Mid-afternoon, I found myself alone in my car, driving up through the Palisades. As I rounded the corner on Sunset heading west, I gasped. Dozens of American flags greeted me as the start of the Palisades where the National Guard had set up shop. Instead of piles of debris in all the lots, everything had been cleared with empty lots, rectangular piles of packed dirt, all merging into one making it look like open fields as far as the eye could see instead of hundreds of homes. Construction signs were the only markers separating the plots of land. I kept driving, my eyes filled with tears. It somehow looked and felt like the wild west, as if no one had ever lived there, as if the land was just now being inhabited. It was so big, so vast. And yet, I was looking at loss, at homes and belongings lost forever, of mourning and grief.

Unlike the first time I drove through after the fire, when residents stood shocked in hazmat suits sorting through the rubble of what had been their homes, this time I knew many people had moved on. Families had filed permits to rebuild. Friends had sold their plots. Relocated. Rented. Bought elsewhere. And yet, the destruction, the scale of it, was so massive that it still tore right into me.

Kyle and I used to walk up and down our hill often. It was a workout and one of our favorite pastimes. We would wander past the homes, many of them unchanged for decades, wondering who lived where, what their lives were like. We popped into open houses. We visited friends. We lingered. Noticed. We took in the sight of masses of lavender flowers at one house, the tinkling sound of fountains at another. We watched some houses be built over the eight years we’d lived there.

Even though we lived most of the time in New York, we’d also made this slice of paradise our home, our kids’ vacation destination, where we worked, where we hosted book events and author gatherings, where we planned and were creative, where we relaxed and felt restored. Our home base. Our reset button in an increasingly crazy world.

I cried most the way up the hill. I gasped and covered my heart. Kyle was waiting for me outside with a big smile but right away he could tell I wasn’t okay. All that loss. It felt like our home was in the middle of a graveyard. What? Were we supposed to make an espresso and relax looking out over all that devastation? The silence was chilling. I went inside. It looked the same but it… wasn’t.

We sat on the couch in front of my office desk where I did all my podcasts and looked out the window. The view was of the houses that remained but the many that weren’t, all the way to the ocean.

“It’s just not time,” Kyle said, understanding. I’d been the one pressuring us to move back in and yet I had to admit I was wrong. “It’s okay. It was just premature.”

It felt like I’d lost the home all over again.

Where did I belong in L.A. anyway? If only I could just live at my bookstore.

The grief floored me. I recognized it as it wrapped itself around me like an old, familiar coat. One little thing could set the whole chain of emotions back in motion — and when it happened, it was hard to take it off again as if the zipper had gotten stuck.

Logically I knew that when this grief response happened, it always took me a while to get back to baseline. I also knew that I would still be able to smile and enjoy public events. Years of coping had trained me. And I did.

But when those were over, I also knew I would fold inwards, putting up walls like a foldable tent, and retract when I was alone or just with Kyle. I canceled plans that I knew would require me to be upbeat but couldn't explain why. I mean, I felt ridiculous being so upset. The fire was months ago! I didn’t live there full-time! Who was I to be this upset!?! It sounded crazy. And the house was still standing.

But it was precisely everyone else’s loss too that was making me feel so gutted. It was the loss upon loss upon loss on every side. It was the disappointment of not being able to recapture what was lost. It was acknowledging, finally, that it will never be the same. It just won’t.

I drove around the rest of the day with my suitcase in the car feeling like nowhere could ever be home in L.A. again.

The next morning, we woke up early from jet lag. It was pitch black out as Kyle and I made coffee in our jammies.

“What if we try again?” He suggested. “Maybe it’ll feel better today. We’ll go up, have coffee and watch the sunrise like we used to.”

I was skeptical. How could it be better? But why not? That ping of optimism slid into my soul again. What if?

“We’ll go up the other way this time,” Kyle said, meaning we’d enter our neighborhood from the west side of Sunset. “I haven’t gone through that part of the neighorhood.”

We stopped at the Starbucks in the Highlands area of the Palisades at 6 am, looking at the “Welcome back” sign and then, with another coffee in hand, drove up a street where we saw the first home we’d ever looked at, where we met our broker, where our dreams of an L.A. life first became reality. House after house had a story. House after house was gone. I looked over and Kyle had tears in his eyes, too. How could this have happened?

“It’s really bad over here,” I said, taking his hand.

The sun still hadn’t risen when we pulled into our driveway. We parked in front of the closed garage door in the dark and looked at each other.

“I can’t even go in,” I whispered.

“Let’s leave,” he said. “It’s too soon.”

And then he backed out and we headed downhill in the dark.

I know it’s a true luxury to have a house in L.A. but it was our home. Our neighborhood. And it held so much meaning for us as a couple, as a family. It was our happy place. Heaven on earth. What we had was amazing, but it was eight years that ended in January. It will never be the same. We’d planned on spending most our life there when all the kids were all grown up, never imagining that our little corner of the earth could burn to the ground. Our home was what it was because of where it was, what was around it, and who was around it.

I miss the giant green mountains — now brown and bare — to our left where hikers wandered through, small specks in the massive trees and boulders. I miss the sounds of kids swimming, of music playing, of cars zooming, of dogs barking. What is a neighborhood without its people? I miss being a part of something. I miss being in the house, yes, but also being outside, waving to walkers heading uphill.

I miss our life there. I know — I was so, so lucky to have it at all. But I am still mourning what it was. I worry about so many things to prepare myself for bad outcomes. This was one I couldn’t have prepared for. It’s just so big. I forgot to worry.

There are so many people from the Palisades who are displaced. Yes, they are settled elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean they’ve found new homes. How could they? How can any of us? It takes time and history, streets well traveled, patterns established, short cuts known, rituals memorized. What is our world without a familiar container? It feels disorienting.

It takes so much time to build a home and yet no time to lose it. And now, it’ll take even more time to reclaim that sense of belonging. Most the time when people move, it’s a choice, a well-planned decision. People move for a reason. But this was no one’s choice. The reason was senseless. Horrific. It’s hard to process. It’s hard to move on. And I don’t want to move on. I want to go back. But I can’t. And even if I could, there’s nothing I could have done to prevent what happened.

On our way back down the hill in the dark yesterday morning, we drove along a few streets we hadn’t visited yet. As we turned onto one, we were stopped in our tracks by a massive tree that had fallen in the middle of the street.

“Holy — .”

Kyle slammed on the brakes.

I just stared at it.

Uprooted. Exposed. At an odd angle right there in the middle of the road.

It will never be the same.

Neither will we.