Mount Washington, Monday Morning, January 27
I grew up in South India. As a tiny girl, the ‘custom’ was for American children of missionaries and diplomats to go to boarding school…one in the north and one in the south of the country. As my father’s primary headquarters was in the south, Kodaikanal, in the Palni Hills, tea plantations, jungly forests and breath-taking rock formations, lakes and waterfalls, was where our school was located.
My parents were oblivious to the fact that when they told my sister and me that we would be home schooled, that this was not the case. I was 18 months older than my sister and therefore the first to go….new country, tyrant housemother, and a dorm full of girls that knew each other.
I sobbed into my pillow every night for weeks.
THEN, slowly a shift, into watching the wind in the giant eucalyptus tree outside my window at night with the howl and barking of jackals. This tree, the wind, the jackals became my safe place.
HOWEVER, as this mountain top was covered with eucalytus trees, whenever it rained, the smell of the leaves, along with the locals burning the leaves for fuel, permeated everything. THAT SMELL induced a poignancy in my soul, as it called to the forefront my longing for my parents and sister.
The smell of eucalyptus has created this for me forever, until, in these 8 years of living on my bluff, the two majestic queens of the bluff, overlooking the sea and shimmering in golden light, became, once again, my anchors, my friends, my connection to buried parts of myself. I sat up there every evening with them, snapping their leaves and breathing in deep whiffs, and those feelings of sorrow drifted away.
When we heard news of the fire, I ran up to the bluff, to look down the coast from there, towards Pacific Palisades….the fire seemed far enough away that there wasn’t particular concern. When the evacuation order came beating on the door and I drove down my road, I looked up at my trees.
And I have thought about them for this entire almost three weeks.
Two days ago, when I was able to go to my bluff, there they were, regal, watching, blackened bark and leaves but shimmering.