Two of Swords

The Two of Swords depicts an impossible choice, being caught in the middle, indecision fraught with anxiety and worry. In the Rider Waite Colman Smith deck a woman holds two swords crossed in front of her chest, her eyes blindfolded, braced for battle. She’s coming face to face with her fears, though her blindfold is on, so she’s not exactly seeing clearly. There’s a panic to this card, a crossroads in which whatever path you choose will not immediately announce itself as correct or incorrect. The blindfold also indicates denial, an unwillingness to look clearly at the problem you are facing. 

On Tuesday night, I drove home from my office in Pasadena as the wind whipped around my car. I had been in a writing hole all day — it was only my second day back in my office after a long winter hiatus in which I hadn’t even attempted to work. I had not heard anything yet about the peril my city was facing.

By the time I got home, there were the beginnings of a fire in Eaton Canyon, one of my favorite hikes in Los Angeles, a place where I’ve watched my children splash in the creek, where my dog has bounded up and down hills and brush over and over again, chasing sticks through mud, shaking excess water off onto unsuspecting hikers. 

I got a frantic call from my brother asking if I’d seen the the news about the fires. I hadn't. He could see the smoke from his house in Altadena. He watched an eerie red glow from his front steps, and what looked like flames creeping down the mountain. His wife wasn’t home. She had left to see a movie with a friend only an hour or so before when the world seemed normal. Now Spencer was calling and couldn’t reach her. My brother is pretty level-headed, sometimes his refusal to worry annoys me. But in this moment, the fear in his voice was palpable. “I have to get off the phone,” he said, “I need Abby to come home.”

A few hours later, they'd evacuated to our house. By the next morning, our neighborhood was thick with smoke. We evacuated to my sister and brother-in-laws' house in the Valley. The moment we got there, Spencer insisted on going back to check on his house. I begged him to stay, but he was in action mode. He needed to know. He wanted to see. And, frankly, he was in denial. In spite of our pleas, he got in his car and headed back to see what had become of his house — the house that he and his wife bought two years ago with every penny they had, and spent two years fixing, the house their baby came home to from the hospital, the house they gutted and renovated painstakingly, stressfully, living in the construction zone while my sister-in-law was pregnant, the house that held their memories and the boxes of baby clothes their son had not grown into yet. 

About ninety minutes later, Spencer returned to the Valley in shock. The house was gone. Not partially, not fixably, just gone, incinerated in what must have been minutes. The entire neighborhood was gone. The elementary school across the street, and the preschool down the way, their neighbors’ houses, the new restaurant that they had been so thrilled about opening within walking distance. Altadena was just… gone.

This is not my story to tell. I am merely a supporting player, and I don’t feel comfortable sharing much more about the heartbreak they are going through. My brother and his partner are not materialistic, they are pragmatic and generous, they are thoughtful and mindful about how they show up in the world. They are grateful to be safe, grateful their baby is safe, and they know that compared to many, they are lucky. But they have lost everything. And they are heartbroken. How can they not be? I’m heartbroken for them.

As for me, I feel like I have lived seventeen lifetimes since last week. After spending a night in the Valley, we decided to head to the desert to escape the fumes and the smoke. Palm Springs was packed with people — we ran into so many of our friends and neighbors, our kids’ classmates. Reports kept rolling in — friends and classmates and teachers who lost their homes. My husband grew up in the Pacific Palisades and he watched in horror as the location of every single one of his childhood memories went up in flames. 

There have been silver linings. I’ve heard from so many people all across the country checking in on us, sending us condolences, love, well wishes, prayers, words of encouragement. My brother has cried with and embraced all of his neighbors, tightening the bonds of an already pretty tight community who lost everything together. The gofundme that my sister-in-law’s brother started for them has received donations from so many people from so many parts of our lives — friends of mine I haven’t seen in years. I have cried so many tears of gratitude and heartbreak and even joy in the last week. 

Yesterday we returned home and got to work, creating space for my brother’s family and moving air purifiers around, washing walls and floors and researching water and air quality and trying to control whatever small things we felt we could control. 

But here’s where we return to the Two of Swords — impossible choices. As I unpacked, each suitcase was a snapshot of the headspace my family left our home in. My suitcase was truly insane — I packed three bathing suits and no sweatshirts. I packed multiple crystals and meaningful bells, three tarot decks, and not a single pair of extra pants. When presented with an opportunity to make choices, I made bizarre ones. In a moment when it still looked very possible that our house could burn down too, I couldn’t make a choice. What do you bring? What has meaning? I looked to my husband to pack our passports and necessary papers, and I told myself there was nothing I couldn’t replace or learn to live without. If you start trying to save everything that’s meaningful, you’ll never be able to choose.

I packed clothes for my kids, but when we were leaving on Wednesday morning headed to the valley, my daughter was panicked that our house was going to burn. She asked me every ten minutes or so if our house would be okay. I didn’t have an answer. I told her I wouldn’t keep any information from her. If something bad happened, I promised I would tell her the truth (silver linings of telling the truth about Santa, she trusts me). She asked if she could pack some things just in case. Of course, I told her. And my kids ran to their rooms to gather their most precious belongings.

Last night, as I unpacked those backpacks, I was struck by the beauty and heartbreak in the choices they made. Each child had packed their most treasured items, and what they chose says so much about who they are, what they value, and how they soothed themselves in the face of uncertainty and overwhelming anxiety.

My daughter brought Wraggles, Bugba, and Blankie, her three most prized stuffies – the “crew” as she calls them – that she sleeps with every night. Wraggles was actually a gift to my brother when he was born, but I quickly stole him, making him my special lovey at two years old. I’ve lugged Wraggles all over the world — to China and France, to boarding school, college, my first apartment in Brooklyn, and later my first Los Angeles furnished apartment in Marina del Rey.

G commandeered Wraggles when she was about five years old and he has been hers ever since. Bugba is a Beanie baby raccoon that Zack gave me years ago, an inside joke I can’t even remember. G adopted him into the crew as soon as she heard that he was symbolic of our marriage — she’s got a poet’s heart, a witch’s heart, and she loves old things with a story. Blankie is a yellow quilt my grandmother’s mother, Katy, made when I was born. It’s a nearly forty year old handmade blanket, made by the hands of a woman who would be well over one hundred and thirty if she were alive today.

She brought the Playbill from Wicked, which we saw on January 4, a lifetime ago. She brought a sketch pad, a graphic novel, the note her "Secret Squirrel" wrote her about what he appreciated about her (Secret Squirrel is the crunchy LA progressive school version of Secret Santa), and a blank comic book she's been working on. She brought a purple blob with eyes that we bought for her at the balloon museum we took her to over Winter break, and she brought the journal that I gave her for her tenth birthday, the one that we both write in – a mother/daughter journal for telling each other secrets and keeping the lines of communication open for uncomfortable questions or the moments when she hates me.

This little collection of items speaks to my daughter's heart, her sentimentality, the way she attaches meaning to objects, the way that art and theater and books make her feel safe. Seeing the impossible choices she made in a moment of fear and stress felt like a gut punch, but I was also proud of her. She's learned so much about herself in the last few years. She is unbelievably resilient, living through Covid and a year in Toronto and Trump's election and an insurrection and about seventy million school shootings and now this. She knows how to comfort herself. She knows how to express herself. She's got tools.

My son is only six and he has a much harder time expressing feelings of anxiety and fear. He's sensitive and deeply attuned to feelings of shame and embarrassment. He loves to make people laugh, but it can quickly turn sour if he feels that he's being laughed at. He wants to be in on the joke, and when he isn't it's clear it feels awful for him, like there's a secret being kept from only him. I imagine this must be a little bit what the fires feel like to him. Grown ups are whispering or staring at their phones in horror. He can smell the smoke somewhere in the distance but can't quite conceive of where its coming from or how much danger we might be in.

Unpacking his go-bag ripped my heart right out of my chest, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom style.

In the top right corner is Rhiny, his well-loved rhinoceros (also a stuffie that used to belong to me that he found at my parents' house a few years ago and adopted as his own). He brought his blank comic book too, plus one Godzilla and one King Kong. He brought a drawing he recently did, and a hockey puck he got at the LA Kings game we went to a few months ago. He brought the D&D pirate dice that Santa brought him in his stocking (he doesn't play D&D, Santa just thought he'd like to have dice with skulls on them, and Santa was right). He brought a treasure map kit that he got for Christmas, a rubber snake, a "screaming goat," a miniature Stanley cup, a piece of coral, a Chucky figurine, two tiny cats wearing clothes, a Nightmare Before Christmas stuffy, and a photocopied fake one hundred dollar bill. He threw in a worksheet about the sounds vowels make for good measure.

Neither of my children took a single thing out of their go-bags while we were in Palm Springs. But the choices they made of what to pack embody the two of swords to me. These are blindfolded choices, hastily packed with no sense of what the future holds. When will Toby need a rubber snake in the rapidly unfolding apocalypse? He doesn't know, but he won't be caught without it. Why would Graeme need her Wicked program? Maybe she'll need something to trade to a roving arsonist gang.

As we returned to LA, we noticed that everyone had forgotten how to drive. People were all over the place, making turns when they weren't supposed to, staring off into space when the light turned green. We're all reeling, from enormous loss, from stress, from empathy and survivor's guilt, from uncertainty about the future. The destruction of thousands of homes and two entire communities raises the pressure on an already very real housing crisis. We're all wondering what comes next, and there's just no way to know. The fires aren't over. The Santa Anas are picking up, and even those of us who escaped last week relatively unscathed are not yet out of the woods.

Los Angeles is faced with an impossible choice in this moment, and we would do well to consider our options carefully and honestly (removing our blindfolds) before we act out of impulse and fear. So far, I've been impressed and uplifted by the way communities have rallied, neighbors have stepped up, schools have led, and people have banded together. After the decade we've had, I didn't expect us to treat each other with this much patience and kindness. Los Angeles is a much maligned city, hyped as a place for wannabes, narcissists, and airheads. But that's not the Los Angeles that I know, or the Los Angeles I've experienced this week.

The Los Angeles of this past week is resilient and generous. How we behave in the months and years to come will be the true test of who we are.

I hope these fires remind us how interconnected we are, how a single spark effects everyone. I hope we rebuild with the future in mind. I hope we fix whatever allowed this to happen. I hope instead of defending against the shitheads who want to politicize this, we are willing to have the hard conversations and tune out the noise. I hope that we approach each other with grace and patience, knowing that this crisis has only just begun, and even when the rains come or the winds die down and the fires are contained, there will be thousands of our neighbors left with nothing. They will need our help a year from now too.

I hope we do not choose fear and tribalism. I hope we do not prioritize the wealthy. I hope we do not turn this into a political fight, when it needs to be an honest conversation. I hope this settles any debate that climate change is real (though I'm not naive enough to think it will). I hope we do not experience this loss as a reason to hoard or over-consume. Instead, I hope we all begin to lighten our own load a little. If you have to run from your home in the night, the only things you really need are the beings – the people and the animals. As I told my kids in our drive away from the city we love, "Whatever happens, we have everything we need right here. That doesn't mean we won't be heartbroken if we lose our home – we will. But the family is the people in this car, and that's all we really need."

Recommendations

A google spreadsheet of Black families who have lost their homes and/or been displaced by the Eaton Fire in Altadena with links to each GoFundMe.

Click here and here and here and here and here to donate to families we know and love who have lost their homes. Please feel free to add any additional resources in the comments.

Stay safe everybody. Sending you love.