Being retired, we have been spending a lot of time at our house at Lake Arrowhead. We’ve been going up there during the week all year. But this time, we were up in the mountains on Tuesday evening when I got a message from Lulu that there was a fire starting near home. She sent me a picture of flames visible over Pasadena High School, which is just a few blocks from our house. An hour later, the evacuation order came in. We were already evacuated, but that was just happenstance, and we were sort of trapped there, unable to even know what was happening.
The next day, Lulu was able to get back into the neighborhood to see what had happened. As it turned out, three houses on our block burned, as well as our next-door neighbor’s garage. We came back on Thursday to pick up some supplies from the house, since we weren’t there when the evacuation order came through. So we had to come back to get all the items we would have grabbed on the way out the door. Our house smelled very smoky, and there was water and dirt on the laundry room floor from the firefighters dousing the back of our house to prevent it from catching fire while the neighbors’ garage burned.
I came back again on Sunday the 12th to try and piece the broken gate back together. It’s pretty far gone, but I figured I could patch it up enough to be functional for a little while. Still, I cant complain, since I built that gate a bit over 20 years ago.
We came back from the mountain on the 16th and started some cleanup inside the house. We wiped down the walls in the living room, dining room, and hallway. We also damp-mopped all the wood and linoleum floors. And finally, we washed all the towels and bedding in the house. All of those things brought the smoke smell (relatively) under control.
I like to think we have interesting adventures living here, but this is definitely in the category of adventures we’d probably not miss if it hadn’t happened.
