Lost and Gained

Moonrise over Pepperwood last weekend

Rain's prompt for this week's Thursday Art and Dinner Date is Lost. I first thought I skip this, but then I realized that this prompt actually falls into a time when we, as a community in my city, commemorate a date that is engraved into our minds. Last weekend marked the fifth anniversary of the firestorm.

The night of October 8th to October 9th, 2017 - Sunday to Monday - was a night when many people in our county lost their homes and everything in it to the flames of extremely fast moving wildfires that actually were a firestorm. In my city alone entire neighborhoods burnt to the ground. 24 people lost their lives. About two weeks after the fire I wrote a more detailed post about it which you can read here.

On Saturday evening we went up to Pepperwood Preserve - we are members of this nature preserve, Kaefer had done an internship here and we enjoy the many interesting events. Pepperwood had burned badly in the firestorm and is a great example for how quickly nature comes back after a natural disaster. Their way of commemorating the anniversary was the showing of the documentary film "Embers of Awakening: From Firestorms to Climate Healing". This film was directed and produced by Phyllis Rosenfield and her Listening for a Change non-profit organisation whose mission is to promote understanding and acceptance of human diversity through education, oral history and the arts. I met Phyllis 20 years ago for the first time; she is a remarkable woman.

Here is a preview of the film (it's about 6 minutes):

While there was a tremendous amount of loss for way too many people, we have also gained much from the fires. There is a better understanding that we MUST do something about climate change, since these extreme fires happen because of the changing climate (now we just need to get the rest of the country on the same page). Many people are becoming more conscious of the way they live their life and are changing old habits. There is better "forest management" (can you ever manage nature?), but that seems to be the smallest change since most of our forests are on federal land, and federal is - well, slow (you know, they don't have enough rakes... sorry, I couldn't help myself). There is a tendency to listen to the indigenous people who have lived on this land for hundreds of years and know how to deal with fire. Our emergency alert system has been updated, and "Watch Duty" is currently my preferred system since they are in Sonoma County and report every fire here. I feel better informed. We know how to pack our bags real quick, we do have two grab-and-go boxes that are always ready to go and a list what needs to be done in a hurry. 

Now, let's go to the dinner part - much more pleasant.

Sometimes I'm not in the mood to cook and do some simple things or even grab some frozen items. I call this the "lazy cook". Recently we had a lazy cook dinner - oven-roasted asparagus.

It's so simple it almost makes you cry... Place a bunch of trimmed asparagus spears in a bowl and drizzle with 3 TB olive oil. Toss to coat, then sprinkle with 1 1/2 TB grated Parmesan, one clove minced garlic, 1/2 tsp sea salt and 1/2 tsp ground black pepper. Arrange the asparagus on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake in a 425 F preheated oven until just tender, 12 to 15 minutes depending on thickness. Sprinkle with lemon juice just before serving. Have a glass of dry Riesling with it.