Linnie Galetano stood on the green lawn at Mountain Mesa Park on Friday and pointed up the sloping hillside toward a barren patch of ground visible in the distance.
“That’s where my house was,” she said. “One day it was there, the next it was gone.”
It was exactly one year before, almost to the hour, that the now infamous Erskine Fire raged through the Kern River Valley and into Galetano’s tiny Squirrel Valley neighborhood.
Before it was over, the wind-driven wildfire would claim two lives, 280 homes, and for people like the 56-year-old wife and mother, leave them forever changed.
But Friday was not about lamenting things lost.