I don’t really have any known links to people impacted directly as victims of the Palisades Fire or the Eaton Fire in Altadena, except for this string of connection. In Octavia Butler’s 1993 book “Parable of the Sower,” the story includes how Los Angeles was ravaged by fire in 2025. Butler, who died in 2006 at 58, is marked by a footstone etched with a quote from “Parable of the Sower,” among her most famous novels: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” She is buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena—the same cemetery as my maternal grandparents, Violet and Hiram Rogers.
