March 1, 2026
While prepping for my next offering of Words & Pictures: Creative Writing from Visual Art, for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program this coming March 7-8, I wanted to share with you my own recent exercise in ekphrastic writing (writing to visuals), inspired by my inability to watch an insurance inventory video of the home we lost to the January, 2025, Palisades Fire. The piece will soon appear in The Windward Review.
THE HUNGRY GHOST
Watching as the camera glides down the path to the front door of our recently incinerated home (“vaporized” as the FEMA inspector dubbed it, so intense was the fire), I am a Hungry Ghost. This video was downloaded to my computer from the thumb drive my husband retrieved from the Bank of America safe deposit box weeks after that building was also reduced to rubble. I am happy to report that the video, done as a home inventory nearly 10 years ago for insurance purposes, is still viable. I am sad to say I can’t watch it. Our home is still alive in this video and it makes me feel dead.
It has been nearly 3 months since we fled our coastal canyon home of 18 years, and as I watch the video that brings it all back to life, I die. I am no longer in that room reaching for a pen, a paint brush, a book (1,300 volumes lost, my husband once counted them years ago, no doubt there were more than that consumed by the flames), a sauce pan, tools of my life as a writer, a painter, a reader, a teacher, a gardener, a cook. That home we made does still exist–we visit it in our dreams, when we are able to sleep. And now it exists in the video downloaded to this computer with which I managed to escape.
There was so much more I couldn’t even think of as we prepared to flee. There were the telescoping water color travel brushes I bought on my honeymoon 40 years ago. I tell this to all the outlets I’m contacting in search of a replacement set, a sympathetic story to tug at human heartstrings. I’m looking for humans in this decimated landscape.
I confess I didn’t use the brushes as much as I regularly fondled them, thinking how much I cherished them, what they represented of my longing to become that water colorist blithely capturing the world in veiled pigments, rather than the writer so challenged by language and crippled by knowing none of it ever gets easier. That is my lament. I could sit down and cry, but instead, I just want to paint.
Writing for me has done its job, saved me at so many turns, but it didn’t, couldn’t save us from this fire. Now I can honestly say words fail me. Now I can honestly say this disaster is unfathomable. Now I agree with those who proclaim it unimaginable. But let’s, for a moment, try to imagine it. Think of a war zone, World War II, Dresden after the allied bombings. That is what our community of 46 town homes surrounded by more than 4 acres of gardens at the edge of a wilderness now looks like. Cremated. The immolation, actually, of our entire town, the village center, the surrounding neighborhoods. Our opponent in this war is nature, and to paraphrase Pogo from back in those mid-century comic days, the enemy is us. These days, though, there’s nothing comic about it. Nature is fighting back with wild fires, deadly winds, rising oceans. Nature is out to get us and just might yet.
See for yourself. The glazed green pot that held the Santa Rosa plum tree outside our now obliterated front door survived, as have others. The plants they held have not. The plum tree we drove back in our Subaru Forester, also lost to the fire, from Luther Burbank’s Santa Rosa nursery, is now a charcoal stick railing at the sky. That tree took me back to my childhood, when its ruby fleshed fruits infused summers with a tangy sweetness, as did a companion Blenheim apricot tree. In our no longer standing canyon community, a close neighbor had a prolific Blenheim tree. They gifted us with the fruit, we gifted them with the resulting jam.
This tree, this home, was a reworking of my challenging childhood. As an adult, I was finally getting it right, had gotten myself to a place where everything was in it. You know the saying–a place for everything and everything in its place? Well, this now vaporized home was where everything was in place for me.
I succeeded in imagining it into being–once. With the video’s aid, I will imagine it again. But I can’t bear to watch it just now. I’ll have to nibble at it a few moments at a time, over weeks, if not months, like the last bits of a chocolate bar when stranded on a desert island. I will find myself imagining for a fleeting moment that it still exists, until I reach out in longing for something I see there, in that place it once was, then remember, with a flip of reality’s wrist, it no longer is there. It no longer is anywhere. Then it will vaporize again, this time in the flames of my desire.
In the video, my husband opens the door, enters the living room and describes simply, matter-of-factly, as if everything will always be there, the furnishings immediately inside–the Tibetan rug, that painting over the mantel capturing the essence of another neighborhood, the vibrant orange patio cushions from a shopping expedition with my no longer living sister, who two years ago joined the ranks of my no longer living parents. Every object holding memories of the no longer here, a ribbon unfurling of that life it is said will flash before our eyes as we pass from this existence into the land of non.
So, profuse apologies, but the best I can do today is get just inside our front door. This Hungry Ghost cannot venture any further into the past. Reality is failing her, like the cliffs fail above the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She must get on with her life, this day, what is left of it, for that is all any Hungry Ghost truly has.
