Reader's Digest Australia Dec/Jan 2025

Drawn to Help A few days after the fire started, a friend shared a video with her of a Los Angeles artist offering to create, for free, watercolor paintings of people’s homes before they were scorched. Tragos reached out to the artist, Jordan Heber, asking if she could do Tragos’s childhood home. “I wanted to do it as a surprise to my parents, who are inundated with so much right now,” she says. Tragos sent a photo to Heber, who completed a painting of Tragos’s home in just three days. “Our homes are so much more than these physical, standing things that we keep our belongings in,” says Heber, who lives in Santa Monica. “It’s an incredible honor to create these lasting tributes to the places that held so much life and memory.” T he Palisades Fire in Los Ange- les burned Charlotte Tragos’s home to the ground. The height chart from when she was a child was marked on the kitchen wall. Fam- ily heirlooms filled the cupboards. Her parents’ wedding video from the 1990s was stashed away in the base- ment. All of it is gone. “It was a pretty special and unique house,” says Tragos, who fled with her parents, her younger sister and their three dogs when the fire broke out on Jan. 7, 2025. All the teenager took with her was her high school diploma, her dog’s ashes and a pair of sneakers. “The streets were packed with people running, driving on the wrong side of the road,” she says, adding that everyone knew they were running for their lives. BY Sydney Page from the washington post A watercolor artist made a remarkable offer to people who lost their homes to the Los Angeles fires: “I will paint it for free” reader ’ s digest EVERYDAY HEROES 20   december 2025/january 2026  |   readersdigest.com.au JORDAN HEBER VIA THE WASHINGTON POST After the Palisades fire, Jordan Heber decided to help in a way only an artist could. 21 Everyday Heroes