It is our final night in Alhambra. For the past three months, we have been staying in a quiet back house on a serene, tree-lined street—a welcome landing pad after a few uncertain weeks after the Eaton Fire. I remember moving in at the end of February with a sigh of relief. It was finally a place that felt homey and safe—we were right next to a park, surrounded by single-family homes, on an uncrowded residential street. Target, Trader Joe's, and Costco are a few minutes away. The place itself has three bedrooms, spacious closets, updated cabinetry... all that's missing are a dish washer, dressers, and a bathtub... but whatever! Wes promptly added some WD40 to the squeaky bedroom doors and taped up some cheap paper blinds in the window. We bought a toaster oven, brought over our coffee grinder, and filled the freezer with meat, chicken nuggets, and two gallons of ice cream—strawberry and black sesame—from Fosselman's. We parked Zoe's scooter and tricycle inside of the garage. We definitely geared up to be here for the long haul. I cannot believe that the time has already come for us to move on, again.
Though we are one step closer to moving back to Altadena and I am so ready to be home again, a part of me feels sad as I sit in this near-empty Alhambra AirBNB living room. Maybe I'd feel better if we were going straight home—which we're not. Maybe it's nostalgia for all of the good times that we had here since February. Maybe it's just the fact that life really settled down for the first time, and things felt "normal," so a part of me feels a sense of attachment to this place and this time. In the beginning, there was a bit of an adjustment period. I felt almost invisible to the others who passed us on the wide, flat sidewalks. They had no idea what we were going through, where we were from. Most people had already moved on with their lives and were no longer thinking about the fire by the time we moved in. I kind of wanted people to know, but at the same time I was fine with not talking about it. As time passed, we became a fixed part of the daily in's and out's of this block. My car received its inaugural showering of parrot poop. We started going to the park, ate at the local restaurants, got to know some of the neighbors, met up with friends living in the area, and watched as different groups of renters in the front house came and went. Zoe is never shy with people, and gained favor with pretty much everyone we met. She made us that much more approachable, and we are grateful for her outgoing little personality. I also just feel so fortunate to say that we were able to remain in one place for three months straight, and a great place, at that.
We ended up forming a slew of routines unique to here, and I will come away with fresh memories of Zoe's first few months of being a four-year-old. This place, with its many rooms, closets, and curtains, brought out the best hider and seeker in Zoe. From day one, she was hiding from us whenever she could, even if we weren't counting. As soon as she realized that she was tall enough on her tippy toes to press the buttons on the keypad of the front door, she would race to enter the code. She would also be the first to exit the house so that she could run and hide behind the tree outside to make us find her. In the morning, she would be the one to wake us up by either barging in and saying, "It's wake-up time!!" or, staying in her own bed and wailing, "Wake me up!!" She'd always want to win going up the stairs, but if one of us beat her, she would take it a lot better than she used to. She'd always ask for the foam from shampooing her hair to add to her tabo, and sometimes she would make a huge bubble between her legs, laughing with delight. She had a lot of space in her full adult bed, so she'd do somersaults over and over, with or without clothes on. There were also no bed rails, so one night she actually rolled onto the ground in her sleep. She would give us good-night hugs and kisses through the curly iron stair railing (yes, the same ones that she balanced earplugs on) and watch us go down the stairs and to the living room before going into her own room and closing the door. She'd always want to see us off when one of us left. It was a little annoying, but also cute, when each day she'd insist on just one more hug after I was already halfway down the driveway, and then proceed to call out, at the top of her lungs, “Have a good day at work! Adios! Buenos Dias! Okay! Okay!” I'm not sure if she will still do any of this anymore as we move onto the next place, but I'm sure that whatever she thinks of next will be just as endearing.
Though we tried to only bring over what we really needed, things inevitably piled up and there was plenty of stuff to throw away in the end: a pasta box filled with confetti that we had cut from colored paper for Wes's birthday, a basket of straw from Underwood Farms with Easter eggs, leftover loquat that Wes's mom brought over on one of her many visits, no less than fifteen balloons in various stages of deflation, odd lengths of blue tape that Zoe had stuck to the walls to "fix" the cracks, potted half-wilted orange star flowers from Trader Joe's from one of our spontaneous after-school runs. There were many treasures to save, too: notes that Zoe wrote at school for us, saying things like, LVU MOM DAD FRM ZOE; the picture that she drew of us three (that looks much more advanced than the family picture that she drew at our last AirBNB); her first attempts at drawing rainbows; silly photobooth pictures from a party at Chuck E. Cheese; polaroid photos from Mother's Day in Irvine; bracelets that we made together one napless afternoon using Shrinky-Dinks; medals from the LA Firecracker Run. There were also a few things that I thought twice about tossing, but ultimately did: her earnest attempts at making paper airplanes patched with scotch tape; a plethora of candies collected from many birthday piñatas; and those random balloon stems from a birthday party that she grew so fond of. We had a good laugh over those balloon stems, as she had told a friend who came over to play that they shoot fire, and that little girl legitimately thought that they were dangerous.
In this slice of her life that she lived here in Alhambra, Zoe has gone through whole phases of development. Her pajamas went from a size 3T to a 4T, her crocs went from a 6 to a 7. She started sitting directly on the adult toilet seat without the toddler adapter anymore. She started climbing in over the top of her standing tower instead of through the bottom. She got really good at rinsing her mouth and applying her own lotion. She became a pro at riding her scooter, and started using real chopsticks. She went through mini sleep regressions here. She went through a nasty phase where she would say to me, "You're a bad guy! I don't like you! I don't want to play with you anymore! You're not kind!" Oh, how that would trigger me...and we really worked on it. She also had a breakthrough with emotional regulation, where now she will make an effort to not overreact to small inconveniences. She got comfortable singing the Chinese songs from a nursery rhyme book that I picked up, with her favorite one being Chǒu Xiǎo Yā - 醜小鴨. She also got really confident in her social skills, inviting older girls to play with her by approaching them at the park all by herself. She's had a lot of sweet interactions with older girls in these last few months. To this day, she still remembers all of their names. One of these girls that we met on a rainy day in Alhambra Park happened to be displaced from Altadena as well, like us!
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