Perhaps a bit of Positive Perspective?

I have many. Here is a favorite and it ultimately addresses your topic:

4:50 Monday morning, October 22, 2007. The phone rang. My wife, Marcyn, got up to answer it. “That was an automated call to evacuate immediately,” she said in her calm I-have-bad-news voice. We turned on the radio to hear the newscaster describing wildfires west of Interstate-15 and in our neighborhood, one mile away and upwind from our house. Santa Ana winds were blowing a firestorm directly at us. We had lived in Southern California for 13 years and we had seen this happen to others in 2003 and before. Like everyone else in our region, we had heard the newscasts and read the newspaper guidance for evacuation, but when the call came it was a struggle to focus on executing our mental checklist and not panic.

I dressed in Saturday yard-work clothes and went to the bathroom. Then I forced myself to eat a banana. I retrieved all the laundry hampers and boxes and filled them with the things that make a house a home: health, school, and tax files; appliance manuals and receipts; insurance policies; family photo albums; medical supplies; and the computer hard drives. With the hampers and boxes filled, we staged them by the front door ready to pack into the two cars.

5:15 AM. We woke up our three teenage girls, got them dressing, and started them packing. With the girls working well on their own, we took the next few minutes to ready the cat carriers and put pet food and water in the cars. By now the cats are on to us, looking panicked and wary. They hate the cat carriers. Chumley, the sheep dog, on the other hand, was thrilled with an impending road trip.

We had to improvise smoke and ash masks with bandanas and hankies to load the cars. The air was black and gritty, and the wind drove the grit into every pore. It was time to grab the cats and hope they didn’t pee while being stuffed into the carriers. (They did; some of us had to change clothes.)

Approaching 6 AM. We grabbed a few final “special” items; I made sure I had my new tuxedo, a small mineral and gem collection, a few props for the magic act I do on the occasional weekends as a side job. The older girls took bath and hair products, and our youngest filled her backpack with select precious sock monkeys (she lined up her remaining dolls on her bed and told them everything would be fine); my wife snatched up sweatshirts and two winter coats because even though it was 90° in the Santa Ana conditions, it was October. San Diego’s version of winter was coming. I couldn’t resist taking a handful of favorite ties and shoes. Weeks later we would look at our “special, meaningful treasures” and say, “What were we thinking when we grabbed that?”

6 AM. The air is so black, our breathing so labored, it is time to leave our house, our “4-BR, 2.5-BA 2,150 sf on cul-de-sac in a good school district with community clubhouse,” but not before checking in on immediate neighbors and making sure they were evacuating too.

We never saw embers or flames, but the eerie glow of orange mayhem was apparent. Nineteen months later, CALFIRE issued a forensic investigation report about the fire, making the point that homes started burning while the fire’s front line was still five miles upwind. Wind-borne embers ignited trees, shrubs, and bushes next to homes, or embers entered attic spaces through open-mesh vent holes in the eaves. Over 25 percent of the homes in one neighborhood were destroyed.

9 AM. We stopped for a bathroom at a coffeehouse along the evacuation route. It was then that I noticed my two youngest were in pajamas, and the smallest was panicked. Apparently she had left her luggage, holding everything in the world she cherished, in our garage. We consoled her with the thought that we would probably find her bag later in the overstuffed car, but we never did.

We saw friends from church doing the same thing, taking a pit stop for coffee and a pastry — how normal, except for the infinite line of cars on the road in front of us, the smell of incineration, the ashes blowing like gray snow flurries that do not melt, and the billowing cancer of a black cloud rising impossibly behind us to obliterate the sun and make the sky look ill. I was pretty sure our house and neighborhood were gone, but I kept that pessimism to myself. I looked over my shoulder a lot to see the slow-motion black ink being pumped into the air from the flames of so many unknown homes, so many houses that belonged to strangers and neighbors and friends. Ours among them? Too hard to think about it and still drive and stay calm, stay safe, and look collected for Marcyn and our girls.

11:10 AM. My cell phone rang. It was my next-door neighbor, calling to tell me his son had snuck past the fire/police back to our street to see the state of things. He had discovered our home under siege by embers from a house burning directly upwind and above ours; he had grabbed a garden hose and tried to extinguish the fire, but the high-pressure nozzle of fireballs blowing from the burning house onto ours overwhelmed the little hose. “There’s nothing left. I’m so sorry,” my neighbor said.

Brain freeze: memories, images, smells of home and gardens.

We are together, I thought. We are okay; the girls, Marcyn and I, and the pets. We have our files and papers to prove we are citizens and debtors, patriotic consumers, married and graduated. We had indeed gone to all the back-to-school nights and student concerts. We have the children’s memory boxes holding all their photos, certificates, ribbons, fridge art, and soccer team photos. We have our photo albums and a few small treasures. The house is gone, but our home is intact, right?

But no matter how stoic you try to be, the fact is your base camp, your equilibrium, your personal history, and your heirlooms that help you remember your roots are no more. It is a sensation of which you become more aware over time; the pain grows a little and maybe recedes over the years of recovery, or stays with you like a bruised tendon in your chest.

The few articles of pre-fire clothing we took with us, and our photo albums, were our only tangible reminders of what had vanished. In the first few weeks, it felt as if we were on some sort of weird vacation. The recent memories of our lost goods made them still seem immediate and real. Marcyn and I would visit our lot several months after the fire to see all our perennial flower beds returning from the ashes along the perimeter fence. We would stare at green and orange and yellow chunks of nasturtiums or a carpet of sweet alyssum and these floral textures seemed so familiar and normal with our undamaged fence line behind. The air smelled rich and clean, the sun felt warm. We felt in our souls we could turn around from looking at the familiar and normal flowers and know that our old house would be there, the phantom limb come back. But of course there was no house. There was a flat dirt lot after the removal of debris and concrete foundation. We were looking at a future we neither chose nor planned. That empty dirt lot had great potential—open to anything and everything, but it was vacant. Do you see the dirt lot as half empty or half full?

I have ma.....

other stuff here...

thats what i saw

Sorry I killed your thread. Thanks for reading my story.

We rebuilt as ECO-friendly as we could. Check it out on Google Maps 11430 Luz Road, San Diego, CA 92127

Thank you! We finally put it all behind us this summer. Took 4.5 years to recover!

Don't pay attention to those guys. It's their loss for not being able to focus.

That is a great story and I'm sorry for your loss. Have fun creating those new memories

:drinker: :blushing: :flowerforyou:

Nothing significant to add to your post, but your screen name makes me go :sick:

Awesome.

Mine is more a love story and certainly nothing as touching as the one before! But it's the most interesting one I've gathered in my short life so far

January 13th, 2010,Brooksville, Florida: I'm bored. I'm also kind of depressed because my best friend is gone and besides her, well, I didn't really have many other friends. People keep posting on Facebook to ask them questions on this site called Formspring, so I was like, ah hell, I'll make one. Maybe I can get asked some fun questions. So I make an account. Not a single question. No one really cares, because I don't have many friends anyway. I've recently discovered a website called Mystery Google. Basically, you search for something, and instead of getting your results, you get the results for whatever the person before you searched for. So I figured I'd take the link and search for it on Google, that way, someone of the 300k+ people will see it, hopefully click on it, and ask me a question. I was THAT bored. Somwhere, 1,200 miles away in New Britain, Connecticut, someone saw my link. They were also incredibly bored and had been seeing links like mine all day, thinking how stupid they were. But, he decided to click on mine for some reason anyway. First question he asked was, "How are you?"

Of course, being bored, I replied. I'm good. Nothing unusual. Then we just started chatting between questions. I answered one asking him to make an account so that I could ask him things too. So he did. He figured, why not? I learned his name was Nick. He put up a picture. Nothing spectacular, I'll admit, but there was something cute about him. Eventually I got tired of waiting so long between questions, so I asked him if he wanted to talk on AIM. We both figured, it'll be someone fun to chat with while we're bored and we'll probably never talk to one another again. But we moved the conversation over to AIM, and to my surprise, we ended up talking about all kinds of things. Things we agreed on, disagreed on. He was a very smart man, I could tell that much. He made me laugh with his corny jokes. He called me pretty without coming right out and saying it. After I just got too tired, I told him I was going to bed, but that it was really nice to talk to him. He gave me his e-mail in case I wanted to talk again, and even his phone number if I wanted to call! It was kind of forward, but he meant well, I determined.

January 14th, 2010: The next day I found myself jumping out of bed to get my laptop, remembering the night before, desperately hoping he was online. To my joy, he was. But then I hesitated. What if he doesn't want to talk again? What if he thinks it's weird that I'm IMing him again? I figured, hell, he lives far enough. If I embarrass myself, no one will know but him, and I won't have to see him. So I sent a message. Hi was all it said. On edge, I waited to see it. I wanted to see it. Finally, I saw it: "N003k is typing a message." Yes! I thought. But why was I so excited? He replied with the same casual hello. Again, we talked for hours. About nothing and everything. I told my friend I would go over to her house that day, so I had to go. I also didn't have a cell phone at the time for me to text with. He said that was okay, and if I wanted we could just talk when I got back.

Over at my friends house, I mentioned nothing about him. I figured it was nothing. Eventually, I ended up on the computer while my friend ran to the store for her mom. He was on. But I didn't know if I should say anything. Was I THAT desperate? Yes, it turns out. I messaged him; he messaged right back. We only talked for about ten minutes before I had to go. I ended up going back over to my house early the next day without having talked to him again.

January 15th, 2010: I got home and practically ran to get my laptop. There he was. We got to talking and he told me he had something to show me. I said, okay. Wasn't sure what it was, but I was happy he had something to show me. He told me if I didn't want to talk to him again after that, he would understand, but he wanted me to know something because he had nothing to lose. Then he sent me a link. Curious, I clicked. And I read. And I cried.

It was a letter he had written. I can't find an exact wording right now, but I'll do my best. When he first saw my picture, it took away his breath. He had never seen anyone more beautiful, and didn't think he'd ever want to. He was just as anxious as I was for me to talk to him again. Not only did he have a crush on me, he wanted to be with me. He didn't have any sexual thoughts, he just wanted to hold my hand, to hug me, to kiss me, to be around me. He hadn't had a girlfriend before, or even kissed a girl before, and unless it was me he didn't want to. He had never been in love, so he couldn't be sure, but he did know he had never been happier. He was so worried I didn't feel the same. Little did he know, I did.

We decided that day to begin our beautiful relationship. Boyfriend and girlfriend sounded so much more superficial than what we were. Two days after meeting, I had fallen head over heels for this guy. And not in a puppy love, 17-year-old girl kind of way. In a, I want to spend the rest of my life with this guy kind of way. And my God, he felt the same. I never felt so lucky in my life.

Fast forward to now, nearly three years down the road. A big move, a puppy, and an engagement ring later, I wake up next to this man and think, how lucky am I? We have overcome all the people being so sure it wouldn't last and all my friends abandoning me because they thought I was stupid. We have overcome being 1,200 miles apart for a year, only getting to see each other every few months, if we were lucky. And I'm so glad we did it that way, because it made us so much closer. Almost two years of living together, having even worked together, we don't get tired of each other. Hell, we even wish we had MORE time to spend together. It taught us to enjoy the time we do have together, even if it's just eating dinner and watching Jeopardy, because we wouldn't rather behave like an elderly couple with anyone else :laugh:

We are getting married probably next year after we are both finished with school. Sometimes I look back and think, holy ****. If someone told 17 year old me I'd be getting married to someone within the next few years and be ready to settle down, I would have laughed. But now, I can't wait. We're gonna have babies together (with lots of practice thrown in to make sure we're doing it right :glasses:), we're going to buy a house, grow old and gray and wrinkly together. He's going to grow an awesome beard. And we're gonna shake our fists at kids when they come on our lawn because we are already old curmudgeons, and we're only 20 and 23. We're going to make so many more memories. And most importantly, we'll be doing it together.

oooh! oooh! i have a story

www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/silvergurl518 (<---i think that's the link?)

oooh! oooh! i have a story

www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/silvergurl518 (<---i think that's the link?)

Silver...you are a special, beautiful kind of person...a strong one. Lovely!

ricky, you know my name, right?