Before this time Jotham Bixby and his family had moved from San Juan to the Cerritos ranch, bringing with them for company at the isolated home, his wife’s sister, Susan, who, in the course of time married the young cousin, John W. Bixby, newly come from Maine. They fell in love and became engaged and kept their secret right under the noses of interested friends and relatives who were planning all sorts of matrimonial alliances except the one that was planning itself—one destined to exceptional happiness.
When they married they left the Cerritos and lived in Wilmington, where they remained for several years. They moved their home to the Alamitos about the time that we came south to settle in Los Angeles.
The intimate connection of double blood-kinship and of business association made the three families seem like one and us children like brothers and sisters.
Our home in Los Angeles became the headquarters for the out-of-town relatives, and several times a week we had some of them for luncheon guests. On the other hand we of the town grasped every chance to spend a day, a week, or the long summer vacation at one of the adobes. All the festival days were shared. Cerritos claimed the Fourth of July most often, for its bare court yard offered a spot free from fire hazard. What a satisfying supply of fire-works our combined resources offered! There were torpedoes, safe for babies, fire-crackers of all sizes, double-headed Dutchmen, Chinese bombs,—to make the day glorious,—and, for the exciting evening (one of the two yearly occasions when I was permitted to stay up beyond bed-time) there were pinwheels that flung out beauty from the top of the hitching post, there were dozens of roman candles with their streams of enveloping fire, and luscious shooting stars, and sky-rockets that rose majestically with a disdainful shriek as they spurned the earth and took a golden road to the sky.
Inter-family feasting at the three homes in turn marked Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day. It was the laden tree on Christmas Eve that offered the second annual escape from early bed-time rules, in itself enough to key one up to ecstacy, without the added intense joy of mysterious expectation and satisfied possession of the largesse of Santa Claus. A Christmas celebration at Cerritos when I was four stands out distinctly in my memory,—a tall, tall tree, as much as twenty feet high, judged by present standards, stood in the upper chamber whose ceiling, unlifted by an excited imagination, is about eight feet. From that tree came Isabel, my most beloved doll, a small bottle of Hoyt’s German Cologne,—how I delighted in perfume,—a small iron stove. The latter was put to a use not contemplated by the patron saint, for I am sure he did not want me to spend the whole of the following morning in duress vile in my bed, because of that stove. This is what happened. After breakfast my almost-twin cousin Harry and I, while our mothers chatted at table, re-visited the scene of the past evening’s festivities and wished to bring back some of the joy of it. Drawn curtains gave semi-darkness, candles stolen from the closet under the stairs and placed lighted in the wide window-sills gave a subdued light, and many little stubs of the gay Christmas tapers from the tree made a wonderful illumination under the bed and in the tent made by the turned-back bed clothes.
But it was the escaping fire from the paper-stuffed toy stove which stood on the sheet about the foot of the tree that made us decide to hear the clamoring for admittance of the suspicious mothers,—we had sense enough to summon help when conditions arose with which we were unable to cope. But Harry was cannier than I, for he sent me to open the door where the worried women stood, while he escaped from the far end, going down a ladder from the flat roof of the wing to the tall weeds beyond the huge wood-pile. I was apprehended and punished. He wasn’t, not being subject to the same administration of discipline as was I. Then it was that I learned that justice does not always prevail in this world.
This Christmas visit affords my earliest memories of Cerritos, although I know I had been there several times before. It was the long blissful summer when I was seven that packed my mind with vivid pictures and remembrance of joyful activity. Is not seven a peak in childhood,—old enough for self direction, young enough for thrills?
After this visit was over and we departed for nearby Los Angeles to make ourselves a new home my life went on in parallel lines, school days in town, vacation days at the ranches. I should tell of them both at the same time to be truly realistic, but the exigencies of narration make it seem better to write of the two experiences as if they were separate. So first, the ranches.
I have told at length of my birthplace, the San Justo. Although it, as well as the southern ranches, was devoted to sheep raising, there were many differences between them. The houses and gardens at San Justo were of New England type, built and developed according to the early associations of the young men. At the other ranches the homes were of adobe, old ones, handed down from an earlier period.
The locations and surrounding country also differed greatly. In the north the house stood in a valley between wooded hills, with no wide outlook. The southern houses were each placed on the brow of a mesa, with a view across a characteristic California river which might be a dangerous torrent or a strip of dry sand, according to the season of the year. The eyes could follow across flat lands, treeless, except for a few low-growing willows, to far, blue, mysterious mountains. It was a very empty land, empty of people and towns, of trees and cultivated lands.