Hot Pockets : Part 2

Empowerment via Flames. los angeles wildfires. fruits of our lands. how we touch.

Everything speaks isn’t only poetry.

That day of weaving in Santa Barbara was the winter solstice and as I started the foundation of the basket I found myself not wanting to weave one at all, I played around and ended up weaving a sun. I left with the promise to come back and share how to do the fascedde cheese basket using the Giunco, a weave that is slowly dying out in Sicily due to a phenomenon called ‘Californization’ that encouraged sanitary regulations restricting the allowance of them to be used in cheesemaking as they once were. I arrived at my parent’s house full from that weaving session and a week spent with my nonni to place that little fascedda sun on top of the christmas tree. I also arrived to lots of kaki slowly ripening that a farmer shared freely.

If you’re looking for light in the winter, persimmons at the start and then citrus throughout are there to serve up. This helped me so much as I waited to move back to Italy.

Growing up in Los Angeles County and Orange County, citrus are almost an icon. Before the construction of the suburban sprawl and after the brutal attempt at a mass clearing of native vegetation and peoples, many acres of citrus trees were planted. You can still find some orange trees in people’s backyards around 100 yrs. old, though those ones are far and few now. Summer memories come thick of me and neighborhood friends sitting under lemon trees sucking on lemons that we poured salt on. For sure the reason why I had a triangle gap in my two front teeth. Something I confirmed recently since I started sucking on them again and my two front teeth responded by becoming translucent haha.

I’m lucky to have grown up with citrus, a group of trees that Southern Italy is also very fond of. A tree that is not native to either place, but has integrated itself into the culture. A tree that can hold its fruit on it for over two years, going from orange or yellow to green again depending on temperature. Go ahead, fact check me.

I was speaking with my sister, who recently moved out of the area affected by the Eaton fire in LA, and we couldn’t fathom what we were feeling for a while.

My comments on the LA wildfires sum up to this - a lot of people knew this could/would happen but they were not listened to and I’m so sorry it came to this. I’ve talked to many people in the fire world, a few with over 40 yrs of experience at hand in California specifically. The only people who were surprised by this were those who were obsessively in their own world. My Zia was a lead of one of the evacuation centers and the most she commented to me was that it’s like a war zone, true desperation and grief when your home is down to embers. Though not comparable, it makes me think of Palestine and Lebanon and many others being bombed, destruction from hate and more deeply, from shame.

The Santa Ana winds, though not exactly the same, can be compared to the Scirocco winds of Sicily. They are strong, warm, and dry mostly. The Santa Ana winds traverse miles from the north-eastern deserts to arrive in Southern California. The Scirocco winds come from the south traversing water, from the Sahara desert in North Africa. Both are often blamed for encouraging wildfires. An Italian article by the WWF recently came out highlighting Sicily in light of the LA fires calling for resilient solutions. That’s what this film intends to reveal.

We have mitigation strategies, the issue lies in our social fabric. Haven’t we heard that before? The air you breathe is the air I breathe. Let’s safeguard the bridges between us so they may not burn.