My mother used to remind me of the saying “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” I had shoes. Today my internalized mother voice might admonish me by saying, “That’s a First World problem.”
We rank suffering. Being killed by a wildfire is worse than losing one’s animals or home, which is worse than breathing the hazardous levels of smoke now enveloping places where I used to live, which is worse than breathing the “unhealthy” levels of smoke on only one weekend where I live now. You get the idea. Still, even when others suffer more, there is sadness for your own loss.
I have shoes. I am not in danger from the August wildfires. But I look daily for updates on fires in places familiar to me from the almost 40 years I’ve lived in the Northwest, most of those years in Idaho. The novelist Kim Barnes reminds us that even when artifacts burn, the stories remain. But those stories are grounded in place, and I wonder what happens when the place where a story is grounded burns, turns to ashes, how that changes the story.