Staying Fit
Photo by: Wayne Lawrence
WEST SACRAMENTO, California — “I’m one of the happier endings,” Claudia O’Reilly says as she pedals a three-wheeled bike down her street with her terrier mix, Lucy, sauntering along.
It’s quite a statement coming from a 66-year-old woman who one year ago lost her comfortable retirement in a pretty condo when an epic fire destroyed most of the town of Paradise, California.
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O’Reilly used to live in the Village Square condominiums in Paradise and had enjoyed its communal pool, her dog-walking friends and views of the majestic redwoods and Ponderosa pines nearby. The development was completely destroyed last Nov. 8.
Yet a long career as a hospital nurse taught O’Reilly that misfortune happens. “I always felt, Except for the grace of God, there go I, because you know horrible things happen to really nice people,” she says.
The day the Camp Fire upended her retirement, O’Reilly already was in West Sacramento, about 90 miles away, staying with her daughter, son-in-law and their two daughters.
O’Reilly had left her two-bedroom condo a day before the wildfire, prompted by an alert from the electric company PG&E that power would be shut off if winds were high.
“A lot of the elderly … were afraid of the fires,” says O’Reilly, a member of the condo board.
Lost all she owned
Still, as she locked the door on all her possessions she could not have known that she would soon lose everything — including clothing, furnishings, musical instruments, family heirlooms, stained glass pieces she had created, vacation photos and a long-held collection of vintage dolls.
“I had $45,000 in life savings, which I know is pretty inadequate,” she says, acknowledging that she hadn’t fully planned the financial aspects of her next stage in life.
She was devasted, of course, to learn that her condominium was nothing more than a grim pile of twisted rebar and rubble, but her 5-year-old granddaughter consoled her, saying, “That’s OK, Grandma. You can live with us.”
That’s what she did, for a short time.
After two months of living in her daughter’s guest room, O’Reilly scraped together money and borrowed some more to buy a used $90,000 manufactured home in a mobile home park near her daughter and son. She moved in at the start of 2019.
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