I’ve always loved a fire, a controlled fire. Fire engages the senses with its scent, its crackle, its heat, its color. My friends evacuated San Diego and made a dash for Arizona during the worst of the recent California wildfires. My father drove past the charred remains of Florida’s tropical flora during the worst of the fires there.

What I felt was a touch of envy.

I was envious of anything of magnitude happening in Florida without my being present for it. The state of Florida is supposed to wait for me to return. In the meantime, the deal goes, nothing of circumstance should occur.

What I do is get lost in the beauty of words…

The passage below is from “The Santa Ana” by Joan Didion:

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.”

She goes on to write about winds around the world that are known to make people sad.

“A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.”

I had to share this breath-taking quote:

“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”