Excerpts
Shielded behind the other houses stands a quaint, humble, rose-colored cottage, its faded siding an indication of its old age. In the dim morning light the distant glow of Los Angeles, and the purple San Bernardino Mountains that border the Mojave Desert, fills the view framed by the kitchen window, casting oddly colored shadows strolling across the hardwood floor. Lately the neighborhood has become an overripe fruit, hanging loosely on the boughs of the older generation, any moment succumbing to the end of its life. Just a scant couple decades ago, its younger constituency busied themselves with white washing their picturesque picket fences and trimming their immaculate lawns while the tales of wives’ gossip drifted lazily through the air. Now, the young have picked up and left, mostly to the north though some venture east, and the ones that have remained find their youthful vigor and vitality replaced by languor and lethargic composure.
Off to the side of the restless highway that connects the tip of California to its northern brethren, about fifty miles or so from the sleeping Pacific, the neighborhood awakens to a new summer day. The shaggy forest to the east of southern pines and palm trees welcomes the rising sun with a chorus of morning bird-song. Before the owls retired from their nocturnal conversations, the bright-red door to the adjacent home of the rose-colored cottage squeakily swung open, revealing a groggily old woman dressed in her vanilla nightgown. With impatient steps she shuffles lightly in her matching slippers to the mailbox, hastily deploying the envelopes she held in her hands, then briskly smacking the red flag up to signal that the metal container was now occupied before scuffling back to the warmth of her home. When she had gone, the air returned to its former state of laze. Owls hooted their lullabies; robins chirped their good-mornings; a great blue heron on the horizon lifted himself into the sky as if to say how-do-you-do. The sound of the cars and trucks crawling across the highway grew to a placid whoosh, whoosh, in imitation of waves expiring on the beach. In another hour or so, the highway became a whiny dragon, dragging its noisy congested body from the hidden cracks and crevices of San Bernardino to the heart of the City of Angels.
