When Life Gives You Burnt Lemons...

Crafty people stick together; there is no doubt about it. When you start looking around, there are crafters all over the world. But when a big event like this happens, the world becomes surprisingly (and reassuringly) small. Since starting this project I have run across all sorts of neighbors I didn’t know I had. Some of us lived so close we could have grown up together. I met Michelle on Etsy, but I certainly lived close enough to through a rock at her house in Westwood, an area that is now totally unrecognizable due to the fires. She posted a link to her flickr photos of the street she grew up on and they were startling. On my trip down this last weekend, I didn’t venture to that side of town. Since there are so many (sick) looky loos, most areas are shut down and police/sheriffs/National Guard members are asking for IDs to enter. But her pictures are amazing. You can take a peek here. Our conversation is good too, so I just pulled it out and am posting it here.

Me: Those pictures are so sad. I used to live in Westwood too and even though I was a shitty little teenager who hated living there, I grew up and now it's just devastating. My parents are over off Valle Verde in Poway. I just came back and though their house and street are fine, a couple of streets away it's a wasteland. And they've been evacuated for like a week now. The power just went back on. I guess the transformer that blew and started the whole [witch fire] thing was actually the one the neighborhood was using their ACs off of. Oh the irony…

Michelle: You know, I hated living there too as a teenager...that's why I live in University Heights now. ;) But it's been really hard seeing what my parents are going through and what my former neighbors are going through.

I didn't mention this on flickr, but we're convinced that one of the main reasons that our house is still standing is that we had a news crew in our cul-de-sac (Danza Circle) while the other homes were burning...and as our roof started to smolder (we watched this on TV minutes after my parents made it to my place after evacuating--it was awful), a news producer ran around to our backyard, found the garden hose, and hosed down the hot spot on the roof.

Eek, right?