I wasn’t born in Paradise, CA, recently obliterated in the Camp wildfire, but in Chico. Fifteen miles and a 35 minute drive away.

That’s because my dad was a doctor in Paradise. Being such a small town, my mom’s choices for OBs were also her husband’s bridge partners and hospital buddies. She was too embarrassed to have any of them play catcher in her very first game of birth-ball, so she drove the distance.

There me and Dad are in the top left hand corner a few years later. I, in my OG Wonder Woman Underoos.

My mother planted hyacinth and daffodil bulbs in the raised gardens in the center photo. I used to walk through the rows like a farmer. My mom’s face when I did this: always starting out like I was a cat about to poop in her vegetable garden, smoothing out to a smile with the conscious decision that, even as a toddler, I could read: Kids are more important than flowers.

Forty years later, when I go to the grocery store in the early spring and the bulb displays are out, the smell sends me back. Not in that old memory way, but like I am again tromping that flowerbed, my full height so low to the ground that I smell not just the flowers, but sun warmed dirt.

It’s a cheat to wax poetic that Paradise is gone. Not when so many people lost everything; every touchstone and social network and piece of property and even their lives. In truth, my family moved away when I was six.

I only went back twice. The first time, when I was a fresh faced and newly minted high schooler, the new owners of our old house got teary eyed, invited me in, proudly showed how they’d changed it. The second time I went back, college aged, smelling of cigarette smoke, and toting a car full of friends (one of whom I later married), the owners met us in the driveway and, although polite, stood their ground until we turned the car around and drove away. Understandable.

After my family moved away from Paradise (God what a name, every sentence comes out so melodramatic), our lives became chaotic; Little arrived, both my parents almost died of different medical problems, they both went back to school full time. We moved, over and over again, so that to this day and this middle age, I have never yet lived at a single address longer than I lived in Paradise.

It always felt like home in an imaginary way, like Neverland, or Where The Wild Things Were. Like I could never go back. But in that same way, it would always be there. Maybe this is how all childhoods are?

That kid I’ve got my arm slung over in the main photo was my best friend from literal birth – our mothers were in the same Lamaze class. He’s also in the small bottom picture, wearing a blue and yellow striped shirt at what might’ve been Middle’s birthday. He came to my wedding in 2000! Middle was quite drama-llama-ding-dong positive he would stand up, object to the marriage, and declare his undying love. But he just kissed me on the cheek, wished me well, and went on to marry a beautiful woman abroad.