Commentary: I spent my childhood in the Palisades homes my mother cleaned. We’re also grieving what was lost.

I woke up on a Wednesday morning to mami standing outside my bedroom door holding a burnt sheet of paper.

“This was in the garden by the tomatoes,” she explained, still in her bathrobe.

I skeptically looked the paper over. An announcement of devastation from flames burning 10 miles away, carried by violent winds to our tiny Silver Lake yard.

The previous day, mami announced that the family she had worked with for 36 years had evacuated their Pacific Palisades home.

“La señora said she only grabbed important documents and left,” she told me.

If I am being honest, I have to say that at that point Tuesday, I assumed the fires would be extinguished before they reached their home. The beautiful Palisades home my mother cared for most of her life had always been untouchable in my mind’s eye.

Mami came to Los Angeles in 1982 as a refugee of the Salvadoran civil war; that same year, she began working as a live-in housekeeper on Palmera Avenue in Pacific Palisades. Mami loved Mrs. Connie and her children. She worked with the family throughout her pregnancy with me, and when I was born, she named me after the family’s daughter.

I remember their home and the churchlike windows facing their lush backyard. It wasn’t a large home; it felt familiar, like the type families on television live in. Mrs. Connie couldn’t keep mami employed full time, so she sought other houses to fill her week.

This is how mami came to work with Mrs. Cris on Toyopa Drive, the home that became my family’s second home. When her family went on trips, we would house-sit and spend days with their beautiful golden retriever — my sisters and I swam in the pool with Cooper until mami dragged us out.

Yesika Salgado’s father, Jose Elmer Salgado, stoops in front of Salgado, left, and her sisters in Mrs. Cris’ pool.

(Yesika Salgado)

On regular days, when mami worked but one of us was sick or on vacation, and there was no one to baby-sit, she took us to work and ordered us to stay in the den and out of the way. But how could a curious little girl do that in a big house full of treasures? Mrs. Cris had figurines, a grandfather clock and gadgets we had never seen. Once, Mrs. Cris asked mami if she could take me out. That was my first trip to a real bookstore and the first time I owned a new book straight off a shelf. It was a luxury I never dreamed of.

Mami was simultaneously working a couple of days at another home, with Mrs. J. on Chautauqua Boulevard, the family she worked with the longest and eventually full time.

If I close my eyes, I can map their home as it stood in my childhood — the daughters’ bedrooms I would hang out in and watch MTV when mami let me accompany her to work; the laundry room where she ironed the señor’s shirts; the pictures of their daughters when they were bright-faced little girls, the tiny garden house where my sisters and I pretended to be Snow White; their home theater that felt like a museum of cinema.

Each family is part of the tapestry of my own family’s memories. When Papi died, Mrs. J. and the señor came to his wake. They sat in the pew surrounded by my huge Salvadoran family, and when I glanced at them while giving my father’s eulogy, I saw their eyes wet with tears. Two years ago, mami retired but we kept in close touch. They often expressed how proud they were of my writing career. When mami was diagnosed with breast cancer in May, Mrs. J. called and continued checking in.

I don’t know a life without them.

Salgado’s mom and sisters play with Cooper, the dog at one of the Pacific Palisades homes her mother worked at as a housekeeper.

(Yesika Salgado)

On Wednesday, Jan. 8, I woke up to the Palisades being consumed by ravenous wildfires. The bus route mami took for nearly 40 years was in flames. I thought of all the ladies, the housekeepers and the nannies mami had befriended during the two-hour bus ride each way. A woman at the bus stop sold tamales and champurrado to them as they left for work. It was an unspoken sisterhood traveling daily from east to west. In my twenties I became one of them, too — a nanny in Palisades, a parking lot cashier in Santa Monica and Westwood, a sales associate at Papyrus.

Through Instagram, I connected with Ana, also a Salvadoran woman who arrived in Los Angeles in 1982. Suppressing sobs, she told me about the family she worked with, her love for them and the pride she took in caring for their beautiful home on Bienveneda Place.

“Each new thing I remember that was burnt is a new wave of grief,” she said. The family has teenage children and all of their friends lost homes. She worries about the trauma. We reminisced over the bus stops, the women walking to their respective houses, the Ralphs and Gelson’s where we all grabbed lunch, the church and the park. Ana only worked one day a week, but she laments not having asked the other housekeepers for phone numbers.

“How will we all connect now?” she wondered.

At home on that Wednesday, I was hopeful that Mrs. J.’s house made it. I reached out to one of her daughters and told her mami and I were praying. Then, as we watched the news, I saw a reporter standing on Chautauqua; everything behind him was smoke and ashes. Mami’s eyes reddened and filled with tears. Shortly after, I received a message from their daughter:

“Yesika, the house is gone. I keep thinking of the love, care and hard work your mom put into that house and taking care of our family. I’ll never forget celebrating her citizenship there.”

I read the message to mami and we let the grief and tears fill our living room. Throughout the day, she recalled the clothes she lovingly looked after, the rooms she knew every corner of, the office that took her too long to clean. That gorgeous house. Its keys still hang here in my home.

“The last thing left,” mami said.

We don’t know for sure what happened to the other homes she worked in over the years — we didn’t keep in close contact with those families like we did with Mrs. J. But the maps of the fires show them in the burn path.

I know this city the way I know heartbreak. I can taste it before I can give it words. My parents found refuge and each other here. I was born into this sprawled city and love it fiercely. I do not know an Angeleno that hasn’t been touched by this devastation. From historically Black Altadena to the Palisades my people made beautiful daily. The pain is immeasurable.

The fires are burning — the city is still on alert. But one thing I know to be true for us all: Nothing can ever destroy what is already in our hearts, in our blood.

Yesika Salgado is a Los Angeles-based Salvadoran poet who writes about her family, her culture, her city and her fat body. Salgado is a two-time National Poetry Slam finalist and the recipient of the 2020 International Latino Book Award in poetry. She is an internationally recognized body-positive advocate and the author of bestselling books “Corazón,” “Tesoro” and “Hermosa.”