by Kaitie Ty Warren
©2025
KaitieTyWarren.com
Patreon.com/KaitieTy
Lyrics:
For our homes, the ones who always held us
For our homes, the ones in which we grew
For our homes, the intergenerational heart
You will live on in us, as we once lived in you
On January 8, 2025, a record-breaking windstorm spread a wildfire across the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and LA County. It was beyond anything our firefighting systems had capacity for, and more than 12,000 homes and structures were burned to the ground, including homes of several of Kaitie’s family members. Even as this page is being made, a week after the wind storm in question, the fires still rage on. And even as this page is being made, multiple wars and genocides rage on worldwide, displacing families and leveling multi-generational villages and homes. It is in the news every day.
On January 10th, Kaitie wrote in Patreon:
My goodness. Our homes.
The sheer gone-ness of the houses of my cousins, aunts, uncles, friends…it’s striking. Gutted, might be the word, to describe this feeling, as well as the visual. If you want to read a little about my feelings while this song was coming through, you can see my Instagram post. This past week has felt very similar to when someone I love has died or is dying.
A cousin in LA said it feels like living in a war; I believe it. The footage looks not dissimilar from the war footage in the news as well. The displaced are a rapidly growing group. And none of us are guaranteed to be exempt.
I value practicing detachment and gratitude, and remembering for myself that, ultimately, it’s “just stuff.” When my grandmother died I wanted to keep every item of hers – my body felt unsafe on this planet without her physical presence, and I wanted all the physical reminders of her. My aunt said “Gramma is in your heart,” offering me gentle permission to let go of her things.
As I grieved the loss of these family homes, hundreds of miles away and entirely helpless to stop it, I thought of this. These houses – these structures that have held me, and my family, friends, events, memories, stories, traditions, generations – are capable of living on in my heart. And they deserve to be honored.
I have been struck by how, in the videos my family members have sent, the homes are gone. Like, GONE-gone. The utter gone-ness is striking and unreal to me, like nothing I’ve ever seen. And I realized that part of why that is, is because the foliage is mostly intact. The palm trees, birds of paradise, the grasses even, the succulents…many of them look a little sooty or have lost some leaves but otherwise look mostly like themselves. But the houses are missing.
So this song is for the houses, and the homes they have been to us – the homes which we now carry on in our hearts.