Friendly postal worker now a fire victim

Torre Ciani works at the post office in Fallbrook. You surely know her. She’s the attractive woman with the round face and bobbed hair. For 19 years, her calm demeanor and gentle smile has appeased even the crankiest customer waiting for stamps.

Monday through Friday, before the fire, Torre drove to work from the home she shares with her son, two cats and a snake at Valley Oaks Mobile Home Park.

Now, Torre can walk to work if she wants to. She’s moving into a vacant house near the post office. It’s owned by a member of her church and she can live there for two months while she begins the daunting process of rebuilding her life, because on October 22 the pleasant routine of her life changed forever. That’s the day fire consumed her home and took with it memories and all but a few simple belongings.

On Saturday, October 27, she was at the Fallbrook Community Center waiting to find out what help she can get from the county Local Assistance Center set up to aid fire victims. “They’re really great,” she says.

Torre looks hopeful. “I lost everything except what I carried out with me,” she says, then lists a computer, a box of family photos, some files, her uniforms. She has no insurance.

“I was raising three kids and every time they needed money I bailed them out,” she explains, shaking her head.

Torre describes how her oldest son found a coffee mug in the debris and saved it. He told her it was the one they always fought over. She doesn’t seem to remember.

When the fires started, she recalls being very calm, but when she saw the smoke, as a precaution, she and her son packed their cars. Then, because she always has, she went to work.

After two hours, the word came to evacuate, so she returned home and off they went, first to one location, then another. It took her three hours to get from the post office to Potter Junior High School.

“By then I was a little ‘shocky,’ having trouble concentrating,” Torre says. “I felt we’d be protected.” If she’d known what was coming she would have packed more things.

“I’m displaced,” she says, then, as often happens to a person used to juggling a life full of kids, work and obligations, she thinks of her son’s wool pants that need pressing, then remembers, “Oh, right, they’re gone.”

It’s those little moments she finds most difficult – those times she remembers and wants to scream. “Every time I think of something, it’s not there.”