A week ago, Mary Hollander was a Ventura County avocado farmer with 88 years of living under her belt and a new crop hanging ripe in the orchard of her hilltop hacienda.
"Now I have smoked guacamole," Hollander said Thursday as she waited for her insurance adjuster.
The orchard had gone up in flames early Sunday, along with Hollander's home and almost everything she owns. Antiques. Jewelry. The violin that her late husband played under the baton of maestro Arturo Toscanini. At the sight of her smoldering 20 acres, another homeowner might have walked away.
But as friends and family are quick to point out, Hollander isn't just any homeowner. Though she's staying at a hotel in Oxnard, nobody close to the white-haired Hollander, who stands less than 5 feet tall, expects her to stay there for long.
"She just wills things to happen," said her son Nicholas, a television writer and producer who, with his two children, shares the property. "This is a woman who went through the Depression and wars and shortages ... the death of a daughter."
Hollander has traveled from the fanciest parlors of New York City to the comfortable life on Long Island, where the family home overlooked Oyster Bay. She moved west a decade ago.
"Everything that I loved was in that view," she said of the Somis home, which on clear days commanded a view of the Pacific, about 20 miles west.
Friends, such as Christopher Walken, Hector Elizondo and Marvin Hamlisch, would visit. Hollander would hold court in the 4,500-square-foot house, where the favorite topics were art, politics and sex.
First warned and then reassured by authorities and news reports as the fire lurched westward last Saturday, Hollander and her son had gone to sleep thinking the trouble was still more than 10 miles to the east.
But in the wee hours Sunday, fast-moving flames attacked, leaving the Hollanders only moments to get out.
They grabbed the two dogs, a cat, a few old photos and pieces of art. Hollander might be among the ashes herself, she said, but for the yelping of her Pomeranian and a warning from a neighbor as the temperature climbed.
"The flames were on both sides of the driveway, and so high," she said, "red and orange and smoking. And the wind was whistling. The flames were so big, they looked like huge waves."
The experience was numbing, she said. She had always figured that "bad things don't happen to good people, and I'm good people."
