Home Is More than an Address

We were on vacation in Phoenix when we saw shocking videos of the raging infernos slicing through huge swaths of our home city of Los Angeles. In a fabled region of mansions, glorious beaches, and celebrity glamour, thousands of the wealthiest among us suddenly became just as homeless as the working-class people from other neighborhoods whose homes had also gone up in flames. Fires are a great and terrible equalizer. 

Riveted by the stunning losses of homes, schools, parks, town centers and historical landmarks, we couldn’t help but worry: would our neighborhood, our home, be next? Conditions were changing almost by the hour. We prayed and watched the news day and night.

I could not stop thinking about the Palisades Fire in particular. I had never lived in that upscale enclave, but I knew it well and loved it deeply. Not for its considerable charm and small-town, friendly feel, but because I spent some of the happiest, most emotionally nurturing days there during a difficult childhood.

My paternal grandparents lived on Marinette Road, a quiet, narrow, sloped street two miles from the center of town that dead ended into deep foliage and brush. Their modest two-bedroom home, built in 1960, sat atop a short but winding driveway overlooking the Santa Monica Mountains. Sliding glass doors opened from their airy living room onto a large, grassy yard, rimmed by bottlebrush trees on one side and a wall of ivy on the other, separating their property from their neighbors. 

On weekends, I often slept over at Cece and Papa’s home, enjoying a sense of peace. We played games, talked and watched TV, and Papa loved showing me his collection of practical joke items, including chattering teeth, a hand buzzer and a rubber chicken. Even I knew these were corny, but I needed the laughs. Our neighborhood in Van Nuys was changing, and at home, I often heard the whir of police helicopters overhead at night, fretting about unknown dangers lurking out in the streets. 

The serenity of Marinette Road gained added urgency when I was nine and my 17-year-old brother died in a car accident — ironically, driving to visit Cece and Papa on their shared birthdays. A heavy cloud of grief hung over my home, and staying with my mellow grandparents offered respite. On Saturdays, hanging out in Cece’s office on Sunset Boulevard cheered me. She was a trailblazing holistic physician whose practice included treatments considered radical at the time, including homeopathy, acupuncture, and moxibustion. I was so proud of her. She was also the first relative to predict I’d grow up to become a writer. This meant the world to me.

My grandparents were long gone and their home sold decades earlier, yet I still grieved what I was sure was the loss of their property in the Palisades Fire. Just a few years ago, I drove with my husband, our daughter and son-in-law to show it to them. Whenever we drove along Sunset Boulevard through the Palisades, I’d look around the village where I had gone to the movies, to lunch, and shopped with my grandparents. It didn’t matter to me that all those businesses were different establishments now; the memories of happy times ran deep. Watching the horrifying videos of the town burning made my heart hurt. Incredibly, when I summoned the courage to check the fire map, I saw that Marinette Road had been spared, while so many homes just a few blocks away were lost. 

These catastrophic fires have focused many of us on the meaning of home. Yes, home is physical, but even more so it is emotional, spiritual, a place that grounds us psychologically. While never my actual address, the house on Marinette Road was a home for me, filled with the intangibles of love, life lessons, emotional security and nourishment, the passing down of spiritual values, and shared laughter. 

My home in the city has been spared, thank God. I hope and pray that all who have lost their homes in the L.A. fires will find new homes, or rebuild what they have lost, on foundations that no fire can extinguish.

Judy Gruen is the author of “Bylines and Blessings,” “The Skeptic and the Rabbi,” and other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach.