Four little feet hit the floor. Morning! What to do today, everyday was something new. We open the door from the purple room into the narrow hallway. A strange light is coming from the square window above the stairs. Up on the stool we jump, if only we where tall enough to see without it. Our fingers grasp the edge of the window. We saw that extraordinary light coming towards us. What a beautiful sunrise! Orange gleams from the sky, red and yellow as far as we can see. I have never seen anything like it in my whole seven years of life. Oh the color! We were quickly sidetracked, not by a smell, but the absent of a smell. Waffles. We always are woken up by the warm savory smell of waffles when I have a sleepover. We look forward to it. Paige and I jump down off the stool and race down to the kitchen. Where is mom? The kitchen is still clean from the night before. Noise comes from the family room. Is mom watching TV? As we open the door to the blue room, that extraordinary light shines through the window behind the couch where my mom is sitting. Mom doesn't even look up at us. Her forehead creased her usually pretty, kind eyes now are filled of worry and glued to the TV. We hadn't taken two steps into the room when my mom told Paige that her mom was on her way to come get her.

Paige had just moved from our neighborhood to another one further away, she was supposed to spend the whole weekend at our house, it was only Saturday. Something in my mom’s eyes made us not protest this request.

“Taylor go get as much stuff together for you and your sister and be ready in twenty minutes we are leaving for a week”. This made me stop in my tracks. A week? What was going on? My mom told me she would explain everything later and to just hurry.

As we where coming back down the stairs with our stuff we heard the door bell ring. Mom made it to the door before we did. She opened the door.

We stopped dead in our tracks, can't breath, suffocation fills our throats, and hands fly over our burning noses. The smell was unmistakable. Smoke. That is when we put the pieces together, what we had thought was a beautiful sunrise was really the inevitable California wild fires here to wreak havoc.