Photo above or at left: The yellow popcorn rose at the front corner of our former house.

Before the Nunn Fire came to our current home, our former home burned in the Partrick Fire. We found this out by checking with our old neighbors (who live in the “Fairview” house I wrote about here). Our house is fine, they said, but your old cottage burned. They said Google “Partrick Fire” and you can see. So I did and this what I found:

This is the “casita,” a former shop turned into 180-sq.-ft. bungalow, and my “bedroom” separate from the 500-sq.-ft. cottage that we called the “main house.”  Lynne and I were married on the porch in a home wedding, and I am taking credit for the beautiful swirls in the flames because I put three coats of latex paint on this wall just before we moved out almost four years ago. Since then, it has been a weekend home and no one was there when it burned. This photo appeared first in San Francisco Chronicle online, but was quickly purchased by Getty Images and went out into the world. It showed up  the “poster child” for the wine country fires behind headlines on cnn.com, msn.com, and bloomsberg.com, to name a few. I am a regular reader of CNN.com, and the first time this showed up on my smart phone unexpectedly, I was a little chilled. I recognized this burning building but did not know why.

One other picture showed up in backgrounds: this is the cottage proper burning. The big window was Lynne’s art studio.