Mother and Child, While Wildfires Burn

    
Nature.  Humans.  One of my daughters is due to deliver a child in just a couple of days.  What an unbelievably wonderful event, the birthday of a child.  Memories of the birth of my children.  Memories of the births of my other grandchildren.  These are the days for which we live, are they not?  We hope, and we pray, for the safe and healthy entrance of the new life.  We will long remember this new life.

Nature.  The third large wildfire in the last two and a half days has now broken out in the Greater Los Angeles Area.  Southland:  the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region plus the Inland Empire.  Recipient of the Santa Ana winds, arising out of the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert and whistling down from the high desert in the northeast portion of San Bernadino County, south of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The word wildfire doesn't really do justice to these fires.  They are not wildfires, they are firestorms.  They can jump interstates in a single bound.  They can ignite a 100 homes in under five minutes.  These three fires, still raging, have already consumed nearly a thousand homesteads.  But soon we will forget.