❤️ Los Angeles ❤️
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
Is the newsletter still late if I’m sitting down to write it at 6pm Pacific? In any case, perhaps you might have guessed? This newsletter, coming from Los Angeles, is tardy, because its author has been unable to concentrate since last Tuesday. I’m safe. The part of Los Angeles I live in, just south of the 10, in between downtown L.A. and the ocean, if any of that means anything to you, is not imminently at risk.
It seems that we learn each day of more people we know who have been displaced or have entirely lost their homes. Acquaintances, friends, colleagues. Friends of friends, friends of acquaintances. It becomes more incomprehensible, the losses, but that might be some part of my nervous system soft-blocking me from feeling it all immediately.
I mean this to be brief. I want to tell you my little histories with Altadena and Pacific Palisades. How I observed a four-month-old’s relationship to her mother in a home in Altadena while studying to be a therapist. How I walk/ran my first twenty mile run through Pacific Palisades when training for the L.A. marathon many years ago, and, as all the places I trained for ten or more miles, the terrain left its imprint on me.
In the interest of brevity, of my mind and heart that feel like they’ve been pulled in many directions, taffy mind, taffy heart, since Tuesday, watching friends and acquaintances flee the city via social media or via texts, or hearing about Facebook posts (which I miss, because I don’t have it), losing touch, hearing via voice message about someone else’s loss, it’s a lot to process in these opening days of 2025.
If you can help, I hope you do.
My heart is with every person, animal, plant, tree, in Los Angeles.
My heart is there.