Ali Riley of Angeles City lost his childhood home in a wildfire. Her wedding turned into an ‘oasis’

Ellie Riley will never forget her wedding day. And the reason for all this has nothing to do with her oath.

Five days before Riley’s wedding in Ventura County, her parents evacuated from her childhood home in Pacific Palisades. When she should be double-checking details with caterers and florists, she was monitoring the progress of a fire that spread from the horizon to her former neighborhood over the course of half the afternoon.

Three hours after John Riley and Bev Lowe left the house they had lived in for more than four decades, it disappeared – along with other houses on Kagawa Street that had once It was a neat alley of spacious houses, but now only memories remain.

“We’ll know when the wedding comes,” Lowe said of her family’s fate.

However, the fire took away many things materially, but it paid off emotionally and spiritually.

“When the sad news spread, our neighbors just said ‘well, at least we had the wedding,'” Ali Riley added. “I did ask my mom if they would be too sad and she said ‘Oh no, we need this.'” We’ve had so many people lose everything because of borrowed clothes and mismatched shoes.

“Everybody cheers up,” John Reilly added. “A lot of people there also lost their homes. [But] Everyone is happy. This is helpful. Indeed.

Ali Riley is one of the world’s most decorated female footballers, having played in five World Cups and captaining New Zealand (her father’s birthplace) a record 50 times. She also plays for Angel City in the NWSL, so she has a long history of resilience.

Still, just thinking about her wedding to former Swedish footballer Lukas Nilsson less than a week later brings tears of joy and sadness to her eyes.

“We sent out the save-the-date in May. So we’ve been planning it for a while,” she said. “A lot of people came out. It felt like a little oasis in the middle of hell.

“So yeah, everything…is perfect.”

The night before the fire, Ali Riley, who lives in Canoga Park, drove over the hill to have dinner with her parents and then spent the evening on the top of their house looking out to sea. About 12 hours later, her parents’ cellphones buzzed with evacuation orders.

“We’ve actually done this before, so we’ve gone through the drill,” Lowe said.

But other times it’s just that: a drill; the flames never really get close and the couple is able to return quickly. When Lowe and her husband packed their bags this time, they expected much the same. The fire was several blocks away and the wind was blowing from the other direction. Their streets are lined with concrete and asphalt, devoid of towering trees and dry brush.

“We went to some friends in Manhattan Beach. That’s when you could see the rolling clouds,” John Reilly said. “I think Ali and Bev realized immediately that it was gone. I felt hopeful for a few days.

Evacuations that had been brief in the past will never end this time. A friend who snuck back into the neighborhood in the days after the fire shared a video of the home the Rileys hope to return to, where it once stood, dark and in shambles. But there’s no time to wallow in it.

“I think we worry more about other people and whether [the wedding] It will continue. We can focus on other things besides ourselves,” Lowe said.

“There’s no point looking back. The house is gone. Sadly the contents. But we were able to remove a lot of very precious things.

When asked how she maintains such a clear perspective during such a dark time, Lowe said the wedding helped.

“And good insurance,” she added.

Nonetheless, the planned reception in the Palisades had to be cancelled, new accommodation had to be found for the New Zealand guests who were to stay there, and a hundred and one things that had been arranged had to change. However, the wedding went off without a hitch, even though some guests wore blue jeans and bedroom slippers instead of suits and formal shoes.

Later, the bride and groom returned to Ali Riley’s Canoga Park apartment, where they nervously watched the smoke billowing from the Palisades Fire, which had surged into the Santa Monica Mountains and Beginning to threaten the San Fernando Valley.

“We feel very lucky,” said Ali Riley, who was forced to evacuate the team hotel due to a fire during the last Women’s World Cup in New Zealand. “We wanted to have a purpose and be able to help and have a positive impact, connect with our community and give them love. It was a lot logistically difficult, a little difficult, but it worked out and was really, really cool.

“Our wedding went through a fire, but we survived,” she added. “So I think our marriage will last a long time.”