I meant to do some book release thing yesterday, but I got on Facebook and noticed my homeland was on fire! 

I was a little kid in San Francisco, and then my parents divorced and my dad remarried. I moved with my dad, my stepmother and my new older sisters to Sonoma County when I was five. I went to high school in Sebastopol. And you know how your Facebook is full of people you went to high school with? Well, mine is, too, and so my FB feed was a really weird mix of people reporting themselves safe, asking after their parents, asking after their lost pets, lamenting their lost home, posting horrific pictures, and then all of my newer, Midwesterern friends weighing in on if people should kneel during the anthem at football games. And something about Mike Pence, pictures of the fall colors in Wisconsin… Surreal.

Posted by a Facebook friend (i.e. someone I forgot about from high school.)

I called my dad. He’s fine. Rumors were flying all day that Sebastopol was on fire, but as far as I can tell, it wasn’t. I video chatted with Zgjenyue (of Avoiding Sex with Frenchmen fame), and she was at her parents’ house in Sebastopol. She lives in Santa Rosa. She showed Zanimal at I all of the falling debris in Sebastopol (which is 5-10 miles west of Santa Rosa). The air looked a dingy yellow in the picture. Everything was covered in soot and ash. She posted a picture on FB of some of the stuff falling from the sky, and then I guess she thought better of it, because it wasn’t there now when I just looked, but there was just burnt up pieces of junk mail flying around. Again, It was surreal.

And then there were the actual fire pictures, which I am sure you can look up yourself. But the worst was that one of the neighborhood in Santa Rosa that was just  completely gone:

and then one of my FB acquaintances had circled a spot and written, “my house.” I can’t even imagine. (Posting the picture without the circle ^^^^.)

It’s a lot to take in, even from afar. I live in the Midwest these days. It’s hard to get information. Are the fires under control, now? I don’t know. Why were there so many fires at once?

My high school gym is a shelter for fire victims:

Photo by Iris Dunkle. (Go Analy!)

It’s pretty surreal to see that place where you had all of those pep rallies and mock elections- we had this crazy convention every year for class president- and now it’s full of cots! My older sisters’ high school, Casa Grande in Petaluma, is also being used as a shelter. Some of the other schools actually have burned.

Take care, Sonoma County.

Written by Shoshanah Marohn

Shoshanah Lee Marohn is sometimes using the nickname/ pen name Shana Lee, because it is much less complicated, and easier to spell.

1 Comment

jono51

When I first saw those pictures of entire neighborhoods having gone up in smoke I finally understood the devastation that was going on. So many killed. I just can’t imagine what those effected by all this must feel.

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