January 10, 2025
I’m not one to let go of things easily. I’m still driving the same car I had when I was 16. No matter how much my husband complains about its terrible suspension, I won’t let it go. Even as our brains rattle driving over SoCal’s endless potholes. It’s the same car I drove in my old town, through my old neighborhood, up to my old house.
Perhaps it’s expected—my dire need to hold onto old things. I study history after all.
My PhD was about old things. Houses, shops, furniture, clothing. They were things people had lost over 350 years ago. Some lost them in fires, many others because of looting. They wrote up lists, trying to remember every corner of their homes and workshops—trying to remember the precious items locked away in their chests and trunks.
I’ve read about fires so many times.
The Public Record Office of Ireland had gone up in a blaze during the civil war. Documents, history. Gone forever. This summer, I was looking through an old coroner's book. My husband’s ancestor had saved it from a burning pyre during that same war. I leafed through the yellowed pages. Every margin was packed with the hurried strokes of fading ink. A 90-year-old woman—her dress caught on fire.
The heavy, leather-bound book became this forbidding omen. Sitting on the brand-new blue carpet of my in-law’s house. I swear I could almost hear the quiet thumping of its heart—like a warning. Open it, and you’ll only find devastation.
My husband’s aunt looked at that same book without fear. We told her about the 90-year-old woman who died in the fire: “It’s terrible.”
“It’s life,” she replied simply, without an ounce of despair. The coroner’s book wasn’t recording deaths. It was recording lives.
I was always one to search for the silver lining. During my PhD research, I swallowed the tales of atrocity with a perpetual lump in my throat, searching for the moments when neighbors helped one another. In times of tragedy, they warned each other about what was coming. I know there was more of that than was ever written down.
I’ve had so many thoughts this past week. Watching my hometown burn. If my childhood home survives, will it be a historic building? Will it get a plaque nailed to its side quietly telling anyone who walks past that it survived?
“It used to be a thriving town, but after the fire it became a ghost town.” That was something I’ve read—about those old mining towns that exploded into existence after the Gold Rush.
I’ve read about fires so many times. So many times. As a historian, it is always a turning point. The point in our research where the yellow brick road breaks apart and tumbles into the sea. There is a blank space where the history would have been. We cannot write anymore, and we always wonder, “what if it hadn’t happened?”
I drove my old car to the market today. It rattled over the bumps and potholes. More precious that silly little car has become, with its broken window and busted speaker.
I keep telling myself: sometimes those towns don’t become ghost towns. Sometimes they rebuild. And neighbors help each other more than will ever be written down.
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