When I lost my home in a California wildfire, shock scorched my soul. Arriving the morning after the flames swept through I found the beautiful wilderness blackened and charred, stretching into the distance like a felled elephant, gray and unmoving. The air was thick with the smoke of dismembered cells rising from last embers. Around me every detail of our lives, dissolved by the hot storm, drifted in a floating residue of ash.
I crouched to touch the still warm soil. It resisted, then cracked and crumbled like fine porcelain. I dug deeper with my fingers, finding the brown earth, urgently lifting it to smell its old dark and familiar sweetness.
I walked about seeking fragments of my life, finding them in the ceramic shards of what had been my home. Numbly I collected pieces from exploded pots, vases, and plates from our kitchen, dinner parties, and meals, putting them in my pockets.
Later, much later, I took out these pieces. Mixing a cement base I carefully placed them onto the walls of a new pot, choosing a grout the color of smoke. I remembered each story: the vase from a trip to Mexico, bowl from family in New Zealand, plate from Sicily. I remembered who I had been back then, and the way in which my own story had broken.
For many years a succulent has lived and bloomed from its home in this fire pot. It reminds me how stories inevitably reconfigure themselves. One breaks, making room for another to grow.