Friday January 24, 2025

Fire scare!

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1604:

I started writing this post yesterday, after spending about an hour getting stuff together to put in the car if there was an evacuation order for our neighborhood because of the outbreak of a small fire to the west of us. The fire was small, no more than 2 acres burned, and there was only evacuations ordered for the streets right around the open lot that was burning, and evacuation warnings in the adjacent neighborhoods. However, the fire was to the west from us, only about a 10 minute drive, and it has been a very typical Santa Ana day, with gusts up to 14 miles an hour, and unusually hot (got up to 80 degrees, now at 4, still 74.)

We heard helicopters, saw some smoke, so I checked on the Calfire website, that gave information about exactly where the fire was, and that’s when we decided to put together stuff we would put in the car if it got closer and there was an evacuation ordered. What happened in LA was very much in our mind. The last time we actually got the car packed to leave was probably in during fires in San Diego in 2003 or 2007. We decided this would be a good time to make a list and think through what we could put together quickly and fit in the trunk.

Even though the evacuation orders were ended in about 2 hours, we decided to keep bags packed and ready to go over-night. It was certainly a good exercise and I created a document I can pull out in the future.

It is now the next day, all is well. The wind has died down (it had done so by the time we went to bed), and the temperature is not to go as high today. And by tomorrow we are heading into a cooling period, clouds, and even a small chance of actual rain!

Today, only one possible phone call scheduled, and I will continue to do my research into the local newspapers.

I confess this research helps distract me from the current news, which aids me manage my growing dismay over at what is happening in the country. As an historian I am so aware of how bad things were in the period (end of 19^th century and beginning of the twentieth) that our president seems to think was a great time in America, since he seems to have no problem with child labor, rampant discrimination, the corruption of government on all levels by wealthy corporations, constant epidemics, unsafe working conditions, and on and on. And I also am very aware of how hard it was to get the laws that began to protect the nation’s health and safety, began to distribute wealth more fairly through fairer tax laws, unions, and the safety net of social security, etc. and how difficult it will be to rebuild those safety measure, much less make progress in fighting climate change or preparing for the next pandemic, etc.

Just looking at my very privileged life, demonstrates the success of those measures because I know without them, I would never have gotten accepted into my doctoral program as a woman (there were so few female historians), never had the career I had working under a college president (a Black woman), never lived in a diverse neighborhood I live in. In fact, the property deed on our house built in early seventies declared that owners couldn’t sell to any person of color or any Jew. And I am very aware that my good fortune won’t protect my daughter or grandsons if the effects of climate change aren’t addressed, soon.

Sorry to be so negative, but it just feels false not to at least occasionally mention that my struggles with my health or maintaining a life of peace and joy that I get from my writing and friendships are being played out in the midst of much broader concerns about what is going on here and throughout the world.

But meanwhile, here are a couple of blossoms from a recent walk, and I hope they give you some of the pleasure I felt when I saw them.

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