If you had to leave your home in the middle of the night, under duress, what would you take with you? What arcane things might you include? What important items might you forget? These questions have been haunting me lately as they recently befell thousands of people in my hometown when fires swept through huge swaths of Sonoma and Napa (as well as Butte, Lake, Mendocino and Yuba) counties.

Coincidentally, these are some of the same questions I asked my late mother throughout the twenty-one years she lived as a widow.

In the news, I learned about a Santa Rosa native who assessed the empty lot where his house of twenty-five years once stood, and said (I’m paraphrasing) please don’t tell me I’m lucky to be alive. That’s like telling someone just home from war with a missing limb he’s lucky to be alive. I’m not the same as I was before, and I’m not sure I will be. It’s not about the stuff itself, it’s about the memories created obtaining it. His home was ripped away from him; he had no choice in the matter.

On the contrary, my mother chose—at considerable cost emotionally and financially—to side with her stuff, to keep her home and its contents while living under self-imposed, fairly severe, austerity.

As I’ve mentioned before, she loved travel and theatre; she adored being on the road. She seemed to be infinitely happier away from her house. And yet when I suggested she pick out her favorite things at her leisure and allow us carefully to liquidate the rest, she retreated, sometimes offering an explanation, more often just shutting me out. “So many friends regret selling the family home,” she would offer, an attempt explain.

Until her death, she lived in an historic home that she and Dad painstakingly restored. They bought it in 1964, the year of the last devastating Sonoma County fire (a blueprint of the recent one), and they finished in 1969, the year I was born. Also the year of a significant local earthquake. Almost all of the newly-plastered ceilings cracked, and so did much of my parents’ spirit for home restoration. The cracks were discussed but never repaired, and I grew up with those fissures as part of my childhood imagination. I can still picture them in my mind’s eye. A California child learns early about earthquakes (less so about fires as those of this magnitude are so rare).

Over those twenty-one years after Dad died, I tried to make sense of my mother’s choices. The fourteen high-ceilinged rooms by then already were filled with things she found, inherited, purchased, refinished or received as gifts. A direct descendant of Miss Haversham, she increasingly became less willing to let people visit, myself included. Sometimes, she told me, she would wait and hide if someone stopped by. But I digress.

Eventually I started to understand. Possessions became proxies for me, too. But I always have had a more fluid relationship with them, living on the cusp between materialism and spiritualism. Easy come, easy go, my parents would say, perhaps not as kindly as I heard it. They were babies when the depression hit. Dad had enough love; Mom didn’t. And thus, I believe, she tried to save herself, tried to give herself the love she needed by animating the things around her into some surrogate, belated attachment. The chair she was never allowed to sit in. The pillow her mother made of goose feathers that she pulled, cleaned, sewed and stuffed herself. Memories of survival and deprivation, not just of possessions, but of the heart. I am told she took every light switch out of her parents’ home after her mother died—before the house was purchased and moved, the downtown land and pure-cut redwood 1850s house more valuable separated than together. She could keep neither, but she could hold onto the hardware.

“Everywhere I look in this house, there is a memory,” she once said. The notion of her voluntary departure from it now appears to me as must have to her: like pulling muscle from bone. Yet were all of the memories that these items conjured positive ones? Was she not surrounding herself simultaneously with pain? Did the contents of her house ultimately incarcerate her spirit as I perceived they did?

How to separate wheat from chaff even under ideal circumstances? We, who were lucky enough not to be asked these questions in the dead of night with a fire closing in, can ask ourselves. What would you take if you had five minutes to decide? What would you add if you had an hour? A day? A week or more?

I think of Marie Kondo’s notion of what things “spark joy.” The idea seems a bit simplistic to me, as I’ve discovered there are things that don’t spark joy for me, but the memories associated with them do. The old jacket I wore to the Yale Game. The scarf they gave us after meeting the Governor of Tokyo. Neither item I particularly like but losing them may shuffle the associated memories away too far for recollection.

And then there’s Swedish death cleaning, the not-so-subtle concept that “you can’t take it with you when you go,” so one ought to pare down slowly to reduce what is left behind for our loved ones to parse after our departure. As if that deadline is a known quantity. (They suggest starting the process at fifty. Shiver.)

In my case, I was left to parse a lot. So much that I recoil from thinking about my last days in the big old house. The house that I loved like a member of my family, that protected me and helped to raise me, that defined home: a place to retreat, to breathe, to be me.

It was not like that when I returned. Instead I found a hollow shell. I grabbed two suitcases and literally raced around like I was eight and simultaneously on Supermarket Sweep with a list of my favorite things running through my head, trying not to get trapped by the quicksand, hoping not to slide down the rabbit hole where everything all of a sudden has value to me, too, and I am caught in a web of misunderstanding like I once felt with my mother herself.

When I reached maximum capacity each day, I would leave, traveling almost precisely the path of the fire, to Kenwood where I was welcomed by friends. Those evenings were my oxygen, climbing the hill to the panorama of Annadel State Park. The smell of drying eucalyptus, native grasses and herbs. The lone oak trees. (The tinder.) I remember better than any item, waking up on east coast time, breathing in this mystical mix of aromas, and thinking: this is what I didn’t know I was missing. The smell of a homeland. Nothing I could carry on a plane or pack in a suitcase. More primordially home than anything I could ever explain or quantify.

As I followed news of the fire, I held this memory close to me. I studied the path of the blazes and watched the tragedy unfold. I thought about the people I love who still live there and the ones who have passed on. About how my mother and father’s graves would survive even if the buildings around them didn’t. About how everything is ephemeral in the end, but that knowledge doesn’t make any of the losses any easier to take. It’s all in the choice. Lacking that, it’s robbery without a criminal to blame.