California fires evoke a deep sadness from the loss of my animals, my totems, and reminders of who I am

The wildfires roared across the California wine country this week, destroying homes, vineyards and lives.

In Napa, the fire killed an elderly couple who had known each other since grade school and had been married 75 years. Charles Rippey was 100 years old, his wife, Sara was 98.

Their son, who discovered the bodies, said it appeared his father died trying to reach his mother.

Reading the Rippeys’ story and watching news video as people tearfully yet stoically lament the loss of all they owned brings back my own painful fire memories.

It seems like a lifetime ago, a few days before Thanksgiving 1975, less than two months after my husband and I married. While we were out to dinner with his parents, an ancient floor furnace, turned on for the first cold spell of that fall, exploded and our house burned.

The flames took most of our possessions. The rest were ravaged by water, firemen’s axes and smoke.

Our three dogs perished in the fire. We found them curled side by side on our bed, apparently victims of smoke and toxic fumes.

The loss of our beloved pets was the hardest thing to bear.

We also lost part of our identities.

Gone were most of my photographs, books, mementos, record albums. Things that somehow survived the blaze were burnt around the edge or stained with oily smoke.

Dishes fused onto the plastic laminate kitchen countertop. Loose photographs curled into black cinders.

Wedding gifts, furniture, china. Burned. Wet. Ruined.

Clothes blackened by smoke and infused with a smelly reminder that no soap would wash out.

And of our wonderful house, a sprawling two-story, pier-and-beam built in the 1920s with a big porch all around — a shell remained.

My grief after the fire was not merely for an incinerated book or chair or dress. The deep sadness sprang from the loss of my animals and my totems, the reminders of who I am and where I’ve been.

Although I have accumulated new memories, equaling almost as many years as the ones stolen by the fire, I still mourn my beloved dogs and the trappings that charted my growing up.

Even today, the memories of that night and the ensuing weeks are vivid; a whiff of wood smoke brings back the terrible acrid smell of those sooty remains.

And now, as wildfires rage across the California wine country, I think about the property destruction, the lost totems and especially the lost lives.

Wanda Garner Cash is a native Laredoan, and a former newspaper reporter, editor, owner and publisher. She retired in 2016 as a professor at the University of Texas in Austin where she served as associate director of the School of Journalism.