Thoughts of spring

I ride my bicycle to work and my route goes past the old apartment where I lived since I started Courthouse News and up until recently. My old neighbor who moved into my former apartment was out walking her dogs.

I steered the bike over to the curb and we chit-chatted about her five-month old Yorkshire terriers, a bug that was going around, my nephew’s gun shop in Tennessee, his degrees in art and engineering, her majors in dance and accounting, all that in a couple minutes before I pedaled off.

So the house that I bought, and then rebuilt, is a couple blocks away, across California Avenue, a busy street that shortly runs past Caltech to the east.

The avenue is a dividing line between a neighborhood of old apartments to the north and a neighborhood of modest but well-kept homes to the south, where professors and architects live, and where movies are sometimes shot to depict a comfortable, old-fashioned, middle-class life. 

My new neighbors are perfectly nice but I almost never see them. Once in a while a jogger goes by. I don’t stop to have a short conversation with them because our paths don’t cross. We live in our separate houses and, my bicycle being the exception, come and go by car.

I left a human environment at the apartment, where I talked regularly to my neighbor or the folks downstairs, a burly post office worker and his wife, who I would pass walking in and out, or the lady who carried her dog for part of their walks because the dog was old, and then stopped for a smoke on the sidewalk.

The circa-1960 two-story apartment building had a walkway and garden terraces. Between the walkway and the sidewalk out front, there was a kind of human parade.

My French mom used to love sitting out on the balcony, having a smoke herself, and watching folks come and go. When I took a group of Danish folks down to her old place in Baja, she was so happy when, after dinner, the Danish girls, with their bits of jewelry and young dress, sat down at the table and shared a smoke with her.

She missed that kind of détente from her Paris youth, women at a cafe having conversation, coffee and a cigarette, missed it for most of her married life in our more puritanical society and our nonsmoking family.

So I left that human context when I left the long-lived-in apartment. But I have no regrets.

I walked out the front door of my house the other night and the air was cold but pure and sweet. I remember thinking, what a beautiful night.

I now sleep upstairs in a room that is like a screened porch. I feel the night air and hear the varied bird songs, and see the oak tree’s spreading branches.

I swim every morning in a pool with, towering above, a great oak and a tall redwood, and all around is a new garden full of plants that are waiting.

I traded the human environment for a more natural one. My friends from Denmark were visiting over the holidays and wanted to see the new place. They remarked, as they left, about the homeless legions that Los Angeles is known for in Europe, and how far away that all seemed in this comfortable neighborhood with simple houses, old trees and front-yard gardens.

But this is how I realized I did not miss my old cave. I had mostly forgotten about the seasons there. For the most part, they simply passed. I dreaded summer because the two window air conditioners would always lose against the heat of the building which had cooked all day.

But from the house, I look out front to see a dormant dogwood, now just sticks going almost straight upwards, and a redbud, bare sticks spreading laterally, and the Japanese maple, its few remaining purple leaves withered from the cold.

And out back, I see the curving, thin arms of sage that will hold strings of blue-purple flowers. Light-green mat rushes now huddled against the cold will become vibrant with expanding life. Trumpet vines that through the winter have kept only small green leaves will blossom into a patch of bright, red-orange flowers.

Morning stars and seaside daisies and butterfly weed will be better than a Renoir painting with dabs of pure white, light purple and bright orange. A thin, brittle tangle of brush will become a bed of mint-scented rosie posies, and bulbs hidden in the earth will almost overnight erupt into the flush, green stalks and white bells of new daffodils.

And so I keep asking myself, when will it be spring.

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