A piece of paradise lost
Related coverage from Angelus News can be found at https://angelusnews.com/tag/california-fires/
I have trouble talking about the loss without tearing up, as if the smoke and ash from Los Angeles traveled across the country to find me.
My in-laws were French immigrants to California, proud Americans, hardworking and simple in their aspirations. Joseph Bischetti knew extreme poverty in France, and he believed the best way to take care of his family was to work hard and buy land.
In the mid-1970s he and his wife, Andrée, purchased a modest house with a big yard in Pacific Palisades. He could not have known then how that area and its prices would grow, how celebrities and other wealthy elites would move there for the same reasons he did. The Palisades felt separate from the rest of Los Angeles. It was backed up against the Santa Monica mountains, and as the population grew, newly erected houses slowly climbed the hillsides, along winding, narrow streets snaking down to Sunset Boulevard.