ALTADENA, Calif. — Altadena is a community in which many extended households have made their home for decades.

With the Eaton Fire ravaging everything in its path in the area, generations of homes have been wiped out

“To imagine the life you build, and to see it reduced to this,” Eshele Williams said, walking beside what was once her home in Altadena.

Williams had lived here for 16 years. When she evacuated Tuesday at 3:30 a.m., she didn’t have time to grab much.

“I was able to pull a few pictures. My grandmother had a clock, a 25th-anniversary clock from Alpha Beta, a grocery store where she worked at. So we got that. We got my father’s ashes, his flag from the military, and a few more things. Not much,” Williams said. “I think when you think you’re coming back, you only take a little bit.”

But there will be no coming back to the same home for Williams — nor for her mother nor two of her sisters. All of their homes burned in the Eaton fire. They’re now staying in a hotel in Sherman Oaks, thanks to the generosity of a law firm.

But they don’t know where they’ll be in just a few days.

“It is a blessing to live so close to your family. But in this situation, that blessing turned into all of us not having or having the ability to support one another,” Williams said.

They were able to support one another the night of the fire — keeping in communication and deciding as a group to evacuate, allowing all 10 adults, five kids, four dogs and one parrot to make it to safety.

“About three in the morning, we saw it cresting the hill and it’s just blazing. And we all as a collective start calling each other: ‘I think we should get out,’” Kimberly Williams, Eshele’s sister, said. “So all of us got out. We go outside, and it’s just pitch black because there’s no power at that point. The wind is swirling, the ash is in the air.”

Kimberly Williams lost her home, too — the home their grandmother purchased in 1976.

“All my grandmother’s things were there, everything. All our pictures that we thought we’d be able to go back to. It’s just gone. But at the same time, my main thought is like, 'All everybody got out. Even with all the devastation, we all are still together,'" Kimberly Williams said.

Kimberly and Eshele live just around the corner from their mother, Matilda Williams — whose home, where the family was raised, also burned. In addition to her four daughters, she also raised many foster children here.

“People tell me, you know, your mom’s house was everything to me. That’s my first place that I had comfort, that I knew I felt safe, you know, has been — that part makes me sad,” Krystal Williams, another daughter of Matilda’s, said.

About a mile away, their sister Ellen Williams lost her home, as well. As she left it for the last time, her two neighbors’ homes were burning — and she knew hers would be next.

“That last look, when you look behind you as you’re pulling out the driveway. And I was like, 'This is my house. And this is where we have all the family gatherings, and everything’s gone,'" she said.

She never imagined she’d be unable to return to her home.

“You think about the wedding photo, or my son’s pictures when he grew up. My diplomas, my degrees, my, you know, all of that. It’s it’s just reduced to nothing,” she said.

On Saturday, Eshele Williams went back to her home with her son, Brayden, 10, to survey the damage. It wasn’t easy.

Papers saved from her doctorate were reduced to ashes, floating in the air. But in front of her neighbor’s burned home, a Little Free Library stood, undamaged.

Inside, Eshele Williams found a children’s book she had written about foster care. In its pages, a memory of the home she’s lost is rendered by the illustrator.

“This is, this is what our house looked like,” she said, as she flipped through the pages.

The Williams family has started two GoFundMe pages in an effort to rebuild their homes.