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"The fires are scary!"

^{Posted by: CallMeMama}

Just this past Sunday morning, I awoke to a world filled with smoke.  The Southern California sky was this ominous burnt orange color (pun intended) and the east side of our house smelled like we had fireplaces burning in each room.  And what was crazy about all of this was that the fires were miles away from our home.  The scary part was that they were headed our way.

We have been busy brushing up on our local geography, constantly making sure that the fires weren't getting too close.  Even though the fires have never got near our house, it made me nervous all the same.  Apparently, I was the only one in my family to feel this way.  My boys have been entertained by all of the water dropping helicopters flying overhead, and my husband has been singing "Ring of Fire", his attempt at a Johnny Cash imitation. 

School was cancelled for a couple of days, but the air quality outside was so bad that you couldn't go outside to play.  And since the pumpkin patch that we had planned on going to this week burned up (sad...so sad), we decided to do what all good Californians do when the going gets tough.  We headed to Disneyland for the day.

But as we got out of our car in the Mickey and Friends parking garage, I could still smell smoke.  A woman working in the garage looked at our Oklahoma car tags.

"You guys drove a long way to get here!" she said.

"Actually, we live here now.  We were just trying to go somewhere away from the fires where we could spend the day outside," I told her.

"There are fires not too far from here," she said pointing to the east.  "Yesterday there were even some embers falling around the park."

Embers?  Embers falling on the Magic Kingdom?  Now I was more nervous than I was when I woke up to a smoke filled sky.  But the more that I thought about it, Disneyland was probably a pretty safe place to be.  No way would they ever let Cinderella's castle go up in flames!     

We had a great day at the park.  All of the Halloween decorations were darling and help to put me back into a seasonally festive mood.  The Monkey got to see his latest favorite obsession, Buzz Lightyear, and we all enjoyed ourselves on the new Finding Nemo submarine ride.  We had such a fun time that I was too tired to even feel guilty about having so much fun while other families are being evacuated.

Honestly, that's not really true at all.  I did feel guilty about enjoying ourselves at the Happiest Place on Earth while other families are worried about even having a home to return to.  Some friends of ours who lived close to the fires had to be evacuated, and I can only imagine how nerve wracking that must have been for them.  The whole thing forced me to start thinking about what I would take if we were suddenly forced to leave.  Even though we were safe from the fires this week, we might not always be as lucky.       

The obvious choices are the legal documents, the family photo albums, the boys' baby books, and the pets.  But there are lots and lots of things that I would be sad to lose: the pieces of artwork that my husband and I bought while on our honeymoon, my favorite stuffed animal from when I was a child, the bag of the boys' baby clothes in my closet that I just can't bear to part with.  It's the loss of these things, what we call our "prized possessions", that can be so heartbreaking.  You almost want to pack it all up in suitcases and leave them by the back door just in case--all year long.  

My home is mostly filled with stuff that could easily be replaced.  Fires, like any natural disaster, forces us to refocus our attention on protecting the things that matter most in life--the people that we love.  (And if you can protect them somewhere fun like Disneyland--even better.)