out and noticed clouds of smoke so dense that I couldn’t see more than a few houses down the street. After getting online at the local paper to see the breaking news (I still kick myself for not checking Twitter), I learned of a grass fire that had started about seven miles away. (This fire is now known as the Marshall Fire [Wilson 2022]). I thought that the smoke had to be coming from much closer, and, indeed, although I had no way of knowing it then, the fire was at that point about one mile away, burning behind Target, where I had shopped with one of my daughters only two days before. The smoke was so choking and eye-watering, the winds blowing so strong, that we did not wait to be officially evacuated; about an hour after I checked the news, my husband and I threw some stuff, our dog, and our kids in the car and headed to my mom’s south of Denver. When we finally got there, the long way, driving on surface streets away from the fire, we watched our town, Louisville, CO, burn on TV, waiting for the fires to engulf our daughter’s elementary school and our house. We were lucky; we didn’t lose our house (nor did the kids lose their school), but many in our neighborhood did. Not just their houses, but also and heartbreakingly, their pets. We have to walk or drive by the devastation every time we go to school or to work: the charred trees, the twisted remnants of trampolines, patio grills, and Christmas decorations, the collapsed fences, and gaping holes in the ground. If I walk down the path that I used to walk almost every day in the ten years we’ve lived here, I see the houses abruptly

come to an end, and then, the burned spaces where houses used to be.