ashes

Then, teetering on a step stool, I slipped the box onto the top shelf of the hall closet, right behind the Christmas wrap and the three urns containing the ashes of my dead dogs.

Building permits are grinding slowly through the bureaucracy, hammers are swinging and a new Altadena will one day rise from the ashes.

In some cases, families discovered they had been given the wrong ashes.

The firestorms engulfed 59 square miles of Southern California — more than twice the size of Manhattan — transforming entire city blocks in Altadena and Pacific Palisades into corridors of ashes, twisted metal and skeletal trees.

"He's come back and returned, rising from the ashes, the Jamaican phoenix."