Watching the California fires. A lot of them are happening in my old stomping grounds. When I heard the fire was just East of John Wayne airport, I went on Google Earth to look it up. I used to live half a mile from John Wayne Airport. Of course, then there were no buildings to speak of at the airport, just three hangars and a windsock. I could see straight there through my kitchen door. Now there are a million people (I'm exaggerating) living between that house and the airport. I couldn't believe what it looked like now some 40 years later. Who would have guessed that Hadley's alley would still be there, and not really change that much. You won't find Hadley's Alley on a map. It was really a number on SW Cypress Street in "Santa Ana Heights" which is now apparently a part of Newport Beach! Who knew! It was a tiny farm in the country then, and I would drive home and look out over Newport Back Bay and watch the mansions being built on the sides of the back bay. They were going up like mushrooms. I called them "Tract Mansions" because they were just like tract housing, except they were mansions. At the time I paid $85 a month for my little house that sat on a long narrow strip of land with horse pastures on either side. A house in front of my little house, a garage, a "wash shack" where the groundskeeper lived, and a tiny little travel trailer that was rented out to various people, and then the owner's big house at the back. When I went back to visit someone had planted hundreds of Saguaro cactus in the front yard, so close together you couldn't even walk through there! The yard where I kept my dog and garden had been turned into a horse paddock and there were now horses on the property. They didn't have hardly enough room to turn around! I wrote a short story about that property called Bone Garden because of my landlady's habit of burying bones in the yard. She cooked leg of lamb sometimes, and would bury the leg bone in her garden. She also named her vegetables...and flowers. So when my dog Rami unearthed a long bone my writer's imagination took off. Bone Garden was the result.
At any rate visit my web site at www.thewishfactory.com if you got here some other way.
I'll try to come up with more writing one of these days. Carole J. if you read this send me an email...I don't have your email address. Thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment