Noooo. I wanted to sleep in.

Alerts.

I wake him up and tell him that there’s another fire. I start moving. Brush teeth slowly. Calm down. What do we need? What’s necessary.

I close the window. The smell of the smoke is getting stronger and stronger. Enter mom guilt. We are going to have to go again.

Wrangle everything up. Realize that the work you wanted to do today might not get done because the first priority is safety and then soothing the nervous system. Is everything in place? What else do we need?

I tell her that it’s not the part about evacuating that worries me. I’m more worried about how the kids will take it.

From advisory to warning. We stop rearranging the room. We will not start building the desks.

He gives me a strange look. I tell him that I have a lot of work to do and I will do it from wherever we end up.

I tell her that fire season is a lesson in detachment.

Waiting. Anxiously waiting. We decide we should just have a glass of wine, cancel the hotel reservation at 6 pm if we haven’t heard anything by then. Four minutes into our call with Dad, we get the notice.

Down off the mountain, the smoke cloud is more visible, more ominous. Take care little treehouse.

I tell him that the hard part is the uncertainty: how long will this last? When will we get to go back? What will we go back to?

I laugh to myself. Is this the Richardson curse? Move to new location = worst weather in history.

And yet I still feel gratitude.

But now they’re telling the whole city to be prepared to leave.