My Childhood Home Is Gone
Sometime during the night of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the house I grew up in, and in which my mother still lives, burned to the ground.
I received an emergency city-wide text message around noon. A fast-moving wildfire started in the hills above a portion of Pacific Palisades. The area directly below needed to evacuate. I looked up the coordinates on Google Maps. As far as I could tell, the epicenter was near a fire road, at the top of a long, steep incline, where, as a teenager, my friends and I would go to drink beer.
I called my mom. Her house is in the downwind foothills. She had just woken up. Soon she was in her car, inching through Sunset Boulevard evacuee traffic to my sister’s house on the other end of L.A. She and her three beloved desert tortoises are safe.
I have never considered the possibility that the house in which I spent my youth would be destroyed in a wildfire. Although it’s near a small canyon, the mountains are pretty far away. Previous fires would be glowing lines on distant ridges. This time, the winds, and flying embers, were too strong.
The words I’ve written for my book, memories of my early years in Pacific Palisades, are now strictly memories. The house my grandfather purchased for my mother, gone. The room where, as a nine year old, I used to write in my diary, and listen to records, gone. Indeed, the entire neighborhood, gone. The house across the street, where my sisters and I used to play, gone. Pronto’s market, where I shoplifted a pack of baseball cards, gone. And later, as a young adult, my sisters’ room, where I would sit in the corner and listen to their band rehearsing new songs, letting them inspire my own musical ideas, gone.
I always considered these memories as memories. But there was always a physical representation I could go back to. Now I’m waiting to be able to sift through the rubble.
The photos in this post are located in my childhood house. I took them in 1984, as a sixteen year old, for a high school photography class.
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All words & images © 2025 Josh Haden. All rights reserved.
Oh Josh, that’s truly awful man.
This is terrible. I'm so sorry for you and your mother's loss.