In January, I am ordinarily making lemon curd, lemonade, lemon bars, lemon salad dressing and every citrus-infused dish I can think of. It is the time of year when my decades-old dwarf lemon tree is overflowing with intoxicating Meyer lemons, hanging on spiky branches like yellow baubles on a Christmas tree, heavy and sweet with juice and zest.

But this year my lemons are covered in a layer of soot and ash from the Eaton fires that began a few miles from my North Pasadena home, in neighboring Altadena, on January 7. The fire decimated thousands of acres of land and homes, 17 souls and counting, and the worldly possessions of ordinary people.

I obsessively check the survey map of destruction that city authorities have drawn up, searching for addresses of old friends and new, to determine if their homes survived. Most did not. I check on these friends constantly, afraid I’m bothering them and also worried I’m not reaching out enough, turning to texting as a form of solidarity and love, sending them resources of free clothing, donating to their GoFundMes.

I’m one of the lucky ones. This is a mantra I recite over and over. Survivor’s guilt set in as soon as I returned from being evacuated and realized my home was spared even as homes within two blocks of me burned to the ground. My living room, the only relic of the original 100-year-old home I expanded upon, smells of smoke in spite of the incessant air purifiers humming day and night. But I have a living room to clean. My lemons are covered in soot — but I have lemons and I have a kitchen to cook in. These are problems I am grateful for.

My children wear masks outdoors — a perverse inverse of the COVID-19 pandemic when indoor spaces invoked fear of deadly infections. This visual symbol of the dystopian future Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower predicted hits far too close to home — literally. Butler is buried at Mountain View Cemetery, one mile from my barely spared home. In her 1993 novel, Butler explores a grim world spoiled by climate change and capitalism, set in summer 2024. My neighborhood book club read it last summer, wholly unaware of how close her prediction lurked in our futures.

You never expect your home and community to be the epicenter of a........

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