Resilience Tastes a Lot Like Pumpkin Pie

Immediately after the fire, like literally the next day, I found myself scrambling to connect with the people who meant the most to me: my Resilient Palisades family and the board of the Palisades Village Green. It was all too clear that everything physical I knew to be true was gone. Like everyone else, I was obsessing over the news, watching every clip online, recognizing every street, and feeling each loss closer and closer to home.

I reopened the Village Green board email thread, and Resilient Palisades quickly scheduled its first post-fire Zoom. One by one, everyone confirmed what we already knew. But I also knew that if I still had my community, I still had my home. My immediate trauma-response was to re-establish those connections.

We didn’t give up or fall apart. We reunited from our scattered places and came together, ready to mobilize. The Village Green, miraculously, had sustained minimal damage and even blossomed right on time that early spring. Our board president, Cindy Kirven, through her own loss, sat at a new desk and made sure repairs happened.

Resilient Palisades hit the drawing board, restructuring teams, setting new priorities, and figuring out what our community needed most. We published our Guiding Principles for Rebuilding and hosted our first in-person event.

 But what I’m really trying to say is this: my home was my people. It was neighbors coming together, determined to do right by the world and by each other.

That same feeling showed up again this month at our annual vegan potluck, which, like so many of us, found a temporary home this year. Still, there we were, neighbors and friends, filling a new space with warmth, food, and stories. Resilience, I’ve learned, often begins with simple acts: showing up, sharing pumpkin pie, and keeping the conversation going.

And we’ll keep doing just that.