Joy Has Unfinished Business With Us

The day after the Fourth of July, I was on the phone with a friend, trying to describe something from the parade that I couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t the floats going down a street buttressed by empty lots that were once full of homes and businesses. It wasn’t the marching band butchering a song we all half-recognized either. It was a feeling that arrived before I had a word for it, the way your body sometimes understands something before your mind agrees to believe it. I finally landed on a sentence that surprised me as I said it out loud: I think joy had unfinished business with the Palisades.

For those who are new here, our family lived through the fire that tore through the Pacific Palisades. Overnight, streets turned to ash. Homes disappeared. Schools were gone. Corners we had walked a thousand times became unrecognizable. We spent nearly a year displaced, living out of rentals while the place we loved turned into something we could barely look at directly. The fire leveled a town. It did not level its people, though for a long time it was hard to tell the difference.