"I don't know why the world feels compelled to demonstrate to us that life is more important than belongings," I told my mom. "Personally, I believe I've sufficiently internalized that lesson on the rescue squad. The terrorist attacks only gave it some additional gusto. I'm not sure I see what the world's getting at here."

"What the world's trying to tell us is that an idiot threw his cigarette butt out a car window," she replied. You're not going to sneak any mealy-mouthed quasi-spiritualism past my mom.

We offered to come down and help out, but she declined. "Where would you go?" She was staying at the home of a friend, and on Tuesday they drove up the back way to the house to try to grab some additional belongings. She called me when they returned. "It's bad," she said. The fire was all the way down to the edge of the road, 100 yards from the house. It extended up the mountain past her property to another dirt road at the peak, and was moving down the mountain's flank towards some houses clustered below. Hundreds of acres were burning.

We'd planned to do Thanksgiving here, so she headed up that afternoon. There didn't seem to be much point hanging around there with nothing to do but wait for reports from fire crews. My sister, her husband and my nephew were due in on Wednesday. It was shaping up to be sort of a bizarre holiday.

When we called the local fire department Tuesday evening, the news was encouraging. The fire is mostly contained, they said, and would likely be brought under control the following day. Neighbors, however, had a more disturbing perspective. The road up the mountain was closed, and some said they'd heard the helicopters were now dropping water directly over my mom's house to prevent it from catching fire. As in most frightening situations with limited information, rumor was supplanting fact. I was growing more hopeful that the house would be okay. It seemed far more likely that it would have been destroyed in the initial conflagration, before crews had the opportunity to dig in and prepare a defense. The longer the house remained standing, the more I believed its odds of survival improved.

On Wednesday the story from the fire officials was unchanged: the fire was mostly controlled, and would likely be brought under control the following day. A friend of my mom's managed to talk his way past the cordon and get up the back road to see the house. He reported that the area closest to her home had mostly burned itself out, and the fire line at the edge of the road had held. Although the fire could still cross the road elsewhere and work its way back toward the house, the worst danger had passed. Our neighbor's house, which had been even more directly threatened, had been saved as well. Fire had burned down to the road on either side of the house, but the trench that fire crews dug around it had prevented its destruction.

On Thanksgiving, as we were putting together a dinner in the small kitchen, we heard that the fire was mostly out. My mom mentioned the pile of belongings that she'd pulled from the house when she thought it was doomed to be destroyed. That small pile of what might have been her only surviving possessions was waiting back at her friend's home, where she'd spent the night after fleeing the fire. "It should be interesting to look at what I 'saved'," she said. "I'm not sure exactly what I grabbed."

One item she'd salvaged was an enormous box of daffodil bulbs that she'd been intending to plant at my house. "You know, we could have just bought more," I said.

"I figured I'd need something to do," she answered.