The fireplace was Daum’s favourite thing about her home. Against her neighbours’ advice, she abandoned her home on 7 January. The next day, it was gone.
After the Los Angeles wildfires destroyed her home in January, Meghan Daum found herself mourning the ordinary things – a toaster, five bottles of wine, elephant-shaped bookends – that a life is made of
On 8 January of this year, the house I was renting in Altadena, California, burned down in one of the seven wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area that week. In the bigger picture, the loss of my house seems almost incidental. The entire town, a rustic and piney enclave that abutted a national forest (black bears routinely roamed the streets; there were even wild peacocks), while also being less than 15 miles from downtown Los Angeles, was effectively destroyed.
Some 30 miles to the west, in Pacific Palisades and parts of Malibu, the scope of the destruction was greater, but somehow the story in my neck of the woods feels more heartbreaking, and not just because it was my heart that broke. In the wake of the fires, Altadena has made international headlines. But before that, even most Angelenos had never heard of the place. Unlike its posher neighbours, it was a modest, understated community with a racial and socioeconomic diversity that’s all but unheard of in southern California. It was filled with working-class people and working artists. It was home to young, newly arrived couples as well as elderly folks living in houses that had been in their families for generations. Most of the houses were small bungalows dating to the early 20th century. My favourite thing about my house was the wood-burning fireplace, a feature that is no longer permitted in new construction due to fire danger. Hauntingly, the chimney is the only thing that now stands.
Since January, I have been floating between guest rooms and guest apartments and, most recently, a temporary, semi-furnished rental. I have also, in a rather head-spinning twist of irony, just published a book that has nothing to do with the fire but is nonetheless entitled The Catastrophe Hour. The catastrophe in question is existential rather than literal, “a feeling of ambient doom”, as I explain it in the book’s introduction. I came up with the title well over a year ago. But maybe my subconscious was trying to warn me of something. Maybe the title essay, which is about how my fixation on home ownership propelled me into a ludicrous effort to build my dream house, was actually setting me up for the ultimate revelation. Because as I watch my former neighbours navigate massive and maddening insurance claims while reckoning with the difficulty – and often the impossibility – of rebuilding, I know how lucky I was not to have owned my house. As a renter, my loss is not structural. It’s purely material. I lost stuff. Most of that stuff was cheap, disposable nonsense piled on top of valuable stuff.
Before the fire, I would have told you that I just needed to tidy up and take a few things to a charity centre. In retrospect, I see that my house might as well have been lined with a layer of soot made of impulsive online purchases.
On that fateful night of 7 January, when I decided to evacuate despite neighbours assuring me it wasn’t the first time they’d seen flames from the canyon amid 80mph winds and that everything would be fine, I experienced a moment that will remain seared in my memory until my dying day. Scanning the house to determine what, if anything, I should take with me, I thought there is nothing here that probably couldn’t be ordered on Amazon tomorrow.
Technically speaking, I wasn’t entirely wrong about that. The room I was standing in when I made this determination was my office. It was the room I spent by far the most time in, probably up to 10 hours a day. It was also by far the ugliest, most cluttered, worst decorated, and most cheaply outfitted room in the house. The shelves were from Ikea. The desk chair was from a big box office supply store. The sleeper sofa, a generic beige thing purchased at a chain retailer called Living Spaces, was actually quite expensive (and comfortable), but it’s not like I was going to pick it up and put it in the car.
The books on the Ikea shelves were not my main books. They were mostly advanced reader’s copies sent to me by publicists pitching their authors to my podcast. Truth be told, I’d put up the shelves mostly as a way of creating a decent-looking backdrop for those podcast videos. I also had various cheap ceramic vases and other mass-produced, Amazon Prime-eligible objets d’art. Tucked in between were some framed family photos and folders filled with personal letters, legal documents, handwritten notes for potential writing projects, and (this is mortifying on more than one level) the recovery seed phrase for my crypto wallet.
But on 7 January I didn’t see any of that. What I saw was the mounting clutter that had been torturing me for months. I didn’t think of the jewellery stored on closet shelves and the pieces of beloved clothing hanging on the rack. All I saw were the random items that kept spilling out into my life: shoeboxes I’d refused to throw out in case I wanted to return the shoes, junky towels used for wiping mud off the dog, a pilates ring I never used, and that stupid unfoldable duvet that exploded like a jack-in-the-box every time I opened the closet door.
In that moment, therefore, I did not see that the living room was filled with books and artwork I loved. I did not see the wall of bookshelves holding handmade pottery that my mother had cherished and small figurines of Daum crystal that my parents had collected even though we have no relation to the Daum family crystal studio in France. I did not see the wooden, elephant-shaped bookends left over from my childhood bedroom. I did not see the framed photos of my father playing in his big band in the 1960s and of me posing for a magazine portrait with Joan Didion in her living room in 2003.
For the past four months, I have been trying not to think of the books and the photos and the pottery and the art. I’ve been trying instead to think about how lucky I was to be a renter, how I’ll never buy a duvet again. In more optimistic moments, I even feel a fleeting exhilaration at the weightlessness of being freed from the junk.
But then the weight returns. And what I realise is that sometimes junk deserves to be mourned, too.
One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed over the last month is the way a trip to a big box store or the supermarket can trigger a unique kind of despair. Suddenly, the notion that I had a brand new jug of laundry detergent that burned in the fire fills me with inconsolable sorrow. I’ll remember that I had several six-packs of flavoured seltzer water and five bottles of wine left over from a party. I had a coffee-maker and a toaster that were completely unremarkable. I had a coffee Thermos from an artists’ colony where I wrote significant parts of significant books. I had many dozens of copies of those books, and their loss stings. But somehow, it was the coffee Thermos that stung the most.
I can only guess this is because there’s an emotional safety in mourning a coffee Thermos as opposed to an entire library. Perhaps the mind only opens the tap for as much loss as we can tolerate at any given time. I suspect the loss of the big stuff won’t truly hit me until I finally get a place of my own and realize I have no bed, no sofa, no dining table, no desk.
These things will be replaced in time, but truth be told, I really liked the ones I had. I couldn’t have saved them from the fire, but if they hadn’t been overwhelmed by stuff I didn’t like much at all, I might have paid them the proper respect on the way out the door.
The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays by Meghan Daum is published by Notting Hill Editions (£11.99)
Photographs Courtesy of Meghan Daum, Jon Putman/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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