The first time Ally Walsh saw the house, she cried. That was October 2025, in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. Nine months earlier, in January, the Eaton fire had forced her and her small son out of their home in Altadena. Soon after that, her mother died of ovarian cancer. For much of the year the two of them moved through more than a dozen places. What she held onto was a snack. Her mother used to make her almond-butter toast.
Walsh co-founded Canyon Coffee, and Lane Florsheim's In My Kitchen column in this weekend's Off Duty is about what she kept. The business, first. She started Canyon with a partner in 2016. It roasts coffee and runs cafes in Echo Park, in Los Angeles, and in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where people wait in long lines. The Brooklyn shop takes about one order a minute in business hours, she said. Through the whole year of moving and grieving, the company kept running. Another shop, in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, is due to open this month. A cafe that helped inspire Canyon, she told the Journal, sits in an old gas station in Portland, Maine.
Then the rituals. She makes the same black coffee every morning, weighing 30 grams of beans before she grinds them. Her son is 5 now, and a few times a week she makes the broiled salmon they both love. And every day she eats almond-butter toast, thick slices, a little salt, a little olive oil. Her mother made it for her. It's now one of the things people queue for at Canyon's cafes. Moving around taught her that a kitchen needs only a few good things. She says she doesn't own a lot, and what she has matters to her. The new house, she told the Journal, was “a whole new start, and that's what it felt like I needed.”
What the paper doesn't say, and what we'd add
Here's what the Journal does not say. It doesn't say the Altadena house burned, or whether it was owned or rented or insured. It prints no insurance figure and no dollar figure at all. So the planning point that follows is ours, written for readers who live where this happened.
Our read
This is Insurance and Consumer Protection, M11, with Cash Flow, M5, under it. The fact that carries the planning point is time. The evacuation was in January. The new house turned up in October. In between were more than a dozen addresses. Displacement after a big fire can run for months. So the question for any Southern California household is what would pay for nine months somewhere else. Most homeowner policies carry a loss-of-use line for extra living costs after a covered loss. Few people know the limit on theirs. Read it this week. If it's a low dollar cap or a short time limit, that's the number to fix. Renters need the same line in a renter's policy, and many have no policy at all.
Two more things we'd add, and they're ours. First, the document go-bag. Insurance papers, the deed or lease, passports, a copy of the will and the medical list, on paper and in a cloud folder any phone can open. The night of an evacuation order is too late to go looking. Second, the business. Canyon kept running and is opening a shop through the worst year of its co-founder's life. A business has to be able to run for months when the founder can't, and that's a plan you write on a calm day. Pack the bag while the sky is still blue.