Opinion: Fire, Again

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It compounds geography with tragedy that, when you come down to it, our only unifying experiences as Southern Californians are disasters: miserable traffic, earthquakes and, now, once again, fires.

Wherever you live, on such a day as this, you live under the umbrella of shared smoke. You breathe in the destruction of other people’s worlds. You whisk the ashes of their lives -- family pictures, children’s toys, gas-bill receipts, birthday cards -- from your car windshield.

And unless you are stone-indifferent, you breathe it all out again with a prayer for those lives, and a whisper of thanks and hope because, this time, mercifully, the sorrowful ashes are not yours.

Los Angeles Times photo