OCTOBER 2020
I spent most of October posting some of my favorite childhood memories on my Facebook page, creating various t-shirt designs, and getting ready to move to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I disconnected my cell phone the day before it was renewed on October 20, 2020, and sent the following text message before my plan expired.
Several Houses Down
California is currently under an Extreme Fire Danger warning. It’s especially bad here in the Bay Area, where we haven’t had rain since June. We had high winds Sunday through Tuesday, and the power company turned off our power to prevent fallen trees from hitting the power lines and starting more fires. Many people have been running generators. Our neighbor was running a generator within several feet of his pickup truck. The generator ignited the gas fumes coming from his truck, blew it up, and started a fire that burned down two houses and three vehicles. He also had a lot of ammunition in the house that was firing off in every direction. Because everything was so dry, everyone in the neighborhood was yelling FIRE! to alert everyone to evacuate their homes. We loaded our vehicles with our essentials and got out of Dodge. 24 different Fire Department vehicles appeared on the scene within minutes, and they put the fire out within an hour. Everyone eventually returned to their homes. The Extreme Fire Danger warning is still in effect but the winds have died down and they’ve restored the power.
Ricardo and I walked down to where the fire occurred and snapped these photographs.
Since we lived in the next block, we considered ourselves lucky that the fire didn’t spread and burn down Ricardo’s house, too.
On October 30, 2020, I’m not exactly sure what inspired me, but I began creating a before-and-after image of the house where I spent the first half of my life.
I posted the following on my Facebook page. Our home was sold in 1990. Many flowering shrubs, flower beds, and shade trees were cut down, and it never looked the same after that. It was much more beautiful back then, and I was fortunate to have called this place home for such a long period of my life. Growing up here had such a tremendous effect on me. I’ve visited 50 states in the US and lived in 9, but I’ve yet to find a place to call home like my first. Maybe someday!
Creating this image proved extremely healing for me on many different levels. I could finally revisit the home where I grew up.
I bought my airline ticket for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on October 31, 2020, and was scheduled to leave on November 8, 2020.
I performed a small, private ceremony to honor my ancestors that night, as I had done around the “Halloweens” and “Day of the Dead” in 2018 and 2019 in Arizona and this year in California. The last two rituals in Arizona, in 2018 and 2019, helped me discover the identity of my birth father. I wondered what this ceremony would bring.