"This is a message from the Boulder County fire marshal. You may need to evacuate your home due to a rapidly spreading wildfire in Louisville. Please prepare accordingly."

Susan hung up the phone and took a deep breath. She hadn't inherited her mother's stubbornness and commenced packing immediately.

Eight years earlier emergency management had called the same phone with an evacuation order due to flooding and Susan's mother, Julia, had point-blank refused. Julia demanded she be left to die in the house she had lived in for 40 years. Susan's brother and Julia's caregiver had been unable to convince Julia to leave as water lapped at the back door. Julia's grandson arrived in the final hour and called 911. When the firefighters arrived, Julia sweetly agreed to be carried out. But despite Boulder Creek reaching the back door, the house had been miraculously spared. After her mother died, Susan inherited it.

And now again mother nature threatened to make the family home a memory. A dutiful woman, Susan packed family photo albums dating back to the turn of the last century into her pick-up truck. Alongside them she placed the family papers documenting those of her ancestors who escaped the holocaust and those who did not. She added a few items of minimal value from the house and two featherbeds her mother had sewn. Then Susan rolled up a small Oriental carpet her late husband had bought on a whim and likely while moderately intoxicated. When he had bought it, Susan had been appalled at how much he had spent on it.

Generations of family silver and china which survived WWII by being shipped to Susan's great aunt in New York City would have to stay in the house along with Susan's antique glass canning jar collection.

For herself, Susan took only a pair of pajamas and a change of underwear and socks. The rest of her wardrobe consisted of hand-me-down T-shirts and sweatpants as she spent most of her time gardening and skiing. She opted at the last moment to take the box of paper pamphlets that went with her canning jar collection.

Three hours later, she spoke with her youngest daughter who urged her not to wait for an evacuation order, but to leave before it got dark. So Susan grabbed a few items of food and two bottles of wine for her sister-in-law.

Then she made a final sweep of the house saying a possible goodbye to all that remained. She had just installed new windows, but other than that almost every part of the house was dilapidated and outdated. Would it be better for it to go up in flames?

On the way out the door, Susan debated taking her skis and decided she really wanted a new pair. They remained lying in the front hall.

The roads were empty and she stopped at the King Soopers to get gas before driving up into the mountains to her brother's cabin. She looked back towards her home that boarded Louisville and at a massive black plume of smoke rising high into the sky.

"It was awful," she told her daughters, after her sister-in-law had tucked her in on the sofa and handed her a glass of wine. No one knew what the night would bring, but her daughters, thousands of miles away, breathed a sigh of relief that their mother was safe.

Thankfully, the family home, the one at which Susan's daughters had celebrated nearly every Christmas of their childhood, was spared again.