Staycation.

That’s how friend Celeste White so perfectly referred to the crazed, frantic ordeal of packing up all one’s beloved belongings, but never leaving town.

Celeste and Richard are among our many Food for Thought family members evacuated from their homes because of fire danger. (They’re home now. Yay!)

During the last few weeks we lost power and Internet access in Igo and found charred leaves and ash on our property - surrounded by closed roads and views of distant fires. Luckily, we were never ordered from our property.

Even so, authorities at checkpoints near our house told us to pack up our prized belongings - just in case. That first night, with the sight of flames on the hillside beyond us, we stayed up until morning as we went room to room to choose what would go and what would stay.

We took the expected, such as family photos and albums, and artwork by friends and family. As Bob Grosh, a local therapist, wrote some years back after the Fountain Fire, possessions that matter most in times like these are those touched by people we love.

That explains why we took Bruce’s mother’s chipped, Hawaiian-patterned coffee cup, and the kids’ lumpy clay projects from when they were little, and the Japanese tea pot and cups Josh bought and brought home for me when he was stationed in Okinawa.

I packed the antique nutmeg grater my father gave me. I left behind my lifetime’s collection of sturdyware dishes: Tepco, Bauer and Fiesta. I could have sworn I loved those vintage plates, cups and saucers more than that. Apparently not. 

We filled pillowcases and shopping bags and overnight bags with our booty, and loaded them into Bruce’s truck, along with his special tools and his sister Mindy’s stained glass dressing screen. We looked like we were packed to go somewhere in a hurry, but our truck never left the driveway.

I wanted to take my mother’s oak table, the one scarred with my kids’ art-project markings and a deep burn from one of my mother’s cigarettes. And I wanted to take our funky tooled-leather-and-walnut coffee table. It was Bruce’s first piece of furniture, done almost entirely with a router, his first tool. Bruce said there was no room in the truck for furniture, and besides, we couldn’t take everything.

So we left those things behind.

For more than a week we lived in our stripped-down, vacant house, with walls pimpled with nails and screws; naked of pictures and precious stuff.

Today, despite the smoke draped behind our house, we hear the fires are on the run. (Thank you firefighters!)

Some people, like Richard and Celeste, will savor the next few days as they settle in and breath sighs of relief to realize they dodged the flames. Their homes are safe.

Others, like us, put away the stuff we’d hauled away, in case we had to evacuate. The washing machine and dryer have worked overtime today cleaning the linens used to wrap and protect those things.

Still, other north state friends and family remain displaced. They don’t know when they’ll sleep in their own beds again. They don’t know what to expect when they do return home.

Our thoughts and best wishes remain with those people.

We cheer on the brave firefighters who continue to battle these destructive north state blazes.

Vacation: that’s what I think we should all take when this is over. Maybe we’ll take that vacation at home.  

We’ll walk the property and point out trees and brush we’ll remove come fall when it’s safe to cut a more severe defensible space.

We’ll sit on the deck and keep one eye trained on the horizon for smoke, while the other will fall upon that pile of stuff we’ve yet to put away. 

Do we do it now and assume the fires are gone?

Or do we wait until winter, when we know the fire threat’s behind us?’

Maybe we’ll wait at least until tomorrow.  

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