Hey everyone, happy holidays.

Over this break, the What Next Feed is bringing you some of our best episodes of 2021.

We are taking you back to stories and people that help define our year.

One of those stories was the Dixie Fire.

This past summer, that fire ravaged Northern California for over two

months. And as a result, a record number of people lost their homes. Whole communities were devastated.

One of those people was Margaret Garcia. Her whole town burned down in the Dixie fire.

At the time we spoke, the fire still hadn't been fully contained.

She was just beginning to process how to pick up the pieces,

which is hard to do when your whole town is gone.

Stay tuned until the end of the show.

We'll have an update on how the town's doing.

Margaret Garcia has spent the last couple of decades living in a town that for all intents and purposes no longer exists.

That's because it got devoured last week by the Dixie Fire, the largest single blaze in California history.

It just seems surreal. I would have thought downtown was the safest area, not the one that was going to burn.

Margaret says, her little town of Greenville, it was supposed to be safe.

It wasn't tucked away in the woods.

It was right next to a big lake.

But there had been these warning signs.

We'd been on edge all summer because this is an area where when I moved here almost 20 years ago,

it never got over like 90-some-, 93 degrees, maybe twice in the summer.

It got that hot.

...