Coffey Park couple lives in place of pain and hope following October wildfires

Teri O’Donnell doesn’t want the birds to leave.

Every few days the Maria Carrillo High School teacher returns to her burned property in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park. There, before a blackened redwood tree, she refills hanging feeders for finches and spreads small clumps of seed by ashen earth for plump doves.

“I couldn’t stand the idea they would all go away and forget where home is,” said O’Donnell, who carries in her pocket a beige edge of broken floor tile from her burned house, a place she had lived for three decades.

For O’Donnell, 52, and her husband, Mike, 58, life today involves letting go of what’s been lost, preserving what you can and looking each day for signs of hope. Days can be hard, but every once in a while light shines through when friends and strangers reach out, sometimes in unforgettable ways.

The O’Donnells’ property sits in the midst of a tract neighborhood turned into a wasteland by October wildfires. The Tubbs fire claimed four lives and ?1,200 homes around Coffey Park - among 40 people killed and nearly 6,200 homes destroyed that month in North Bay infernos.

When their home burned, the couple thought back to 1988 when they had moved into what was then a new house. In those days, they didn’t see or hear birds.

“It was pretty sterile,” Mike O’Donnell said of the recently completed subdivision. In response, the couple put up feeders for hummingbirds.

After the fires, O’Donnell told her husband, “I don’t want to go back to where we don’t have birds in our neighborhood.”

In December, after the lot was cleared, O’Donnell hung pretzels coated with peanut butter and birdseed on a donated Christmas tree. She has been feeding birds there ever since.

One recent morning, as O’Donnell made ready to restock her feeders, a dove cooed atop the branch of what had been a tall, thin evergreen. The sounds of nail guns and construction equipment on distant rebuild sites were mixed with the “twee, twee, twee,” of small songbirds flitting around a feeder hung on a dead tree near the sidewalk.

As they paused before leaving in separate cars for work, the O’Donnells reflected on the past six months. To the south, they could see little but cleared lots, burned trees and temporary power poles.

Mike O’Donnell acknowledged it has been hard to grasp the idea that rebuilding doesn’t mean recovering all that’s been lost. Fire survivors, he said, can hold onto a “magical thinking” that after a fire “the insurance company will come and put the house back and all our stuff in it. You almost think that way.”

O’Donnell said for years she has enjoyed nature photography, including capturing images of the 20 rose bushes she tended around her yard. But since the fires, she has found it too hard to pick up a camera.

In their reflections, the couple also spoke of special ways others had reached out to them.

At Christmas, the O’Donnells gathered on Hopper with neighbors, enjoying decorated trees, imported snow and impromptu festivities offered up by ?organizer Ronnie Duvall and ?60 volunteers. One night during the holidays the couple ate Vietnamese food at the lot, sitting on new camp chairs and using an ice chest for a table. They recently had obtained the camping goods when Coleman, Marmot, Levis and other companies came together at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa to offer discounts and free items to fire survivors.

This spring friends ?and strangers surprised the couple with an especially ?memorable gift.

It began after Teri O’Donnell wrote an online post explaining that the fire had claimed a treasured U.S. flag, one presented to the family six years ago when they went to Hawaii to scatter the cremated remains of Mike O’Donnell’s stepfather, Frank Sennello. A former U.S. Navy submariner and Sonoma County school teacher, Sennello had been a Pearl Harbor survivor.

During the family’s visit to Pearl Harbor, a military honor guard presented the couple’s son, Sean O’Donnell, with a U.S. flag during an extensive ceremony that included comments by the commander of the Pacific Fleet and a 21-gun salute.

One of O’Donnell’s former students read the post and reached out to a friend to get the flag replaced. One day during lunch, O’Donnell was brought to the front of Carrillo to meet her equally surprised husband, plus her mom and her son who came home during a spring break from college. There at the flag pole, with school faculty watching, two uniformed members of the Navy lowered a U.S. flag, folded it neatly into a triangle, and presented it to the O’Donnells in memory of Sennello.

O’Donnell said she treasures the flag in part because it flew over Carrillo, a campus where she has taught biology since its opening in 1996.

The O’Donnells are preparing to rebuild this year. But first Mike O’Donnell, an engineering manager at Viavi Solutions, is redesigning their home before the couple takes their ideas to an architect.

O’Donnell emphasized at times she still feels heartbroken and the act of recovery is a painful struggle. But she also said she believes her family can rebuild and in so doing, regain the chance to live among a community of neighbors and have a place to hold holiday gatherings and family celebrations.

Sometimes after feeding the birds she needs time to simply stand on her lot.

“I just want to be home,” she said, “to be in the spot and feel like it’s possible to come back.”

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 707-521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.