Until the very last years of his life he busied himself at odd jobs about the house. Sometimes it would be a session with the grandfather clock, sometimes it would be chopping wood. He had the willow brought up from the ranch in long pieces, which he cut and stacked under the house. He raised chickens and at first cared for a horse and cow. Later we kept two horses, dispensed with the cow, and had a man for the livestock and garden and to drive us about town. We did not have a dog regularly but always cats, classical cats. Æneas was very long-legged and Dido lived with us a long time. I think it was she who went every evening with father for his after dinner walk and cigar.
One Thanksgiving time the wagon from the ranch came, bringing us a couple of barrels of apples, a load of wood and a fine turkey for the feast day. Imagine our dismay, one afternoon, to see it mount up on its wings and soar majestically from our hill top back-yard down to the corner of First and Broadway below. He escaped us but, I presume, to some one else he came as a direct answer to prayer.
Father was always interested in flowers and was very successful in making them grow. Usually there was a box of slips out in the back yard. Often he would bring in a rich red Ragged Robin bud, dew-wet, to lay by mother’s napkin for breakfast. For himself he put a sprig of lemon-verbena in his button-hole. For some reason, he excepted orange colored flowers from his favor. He made mock of the gay little runners by twisting their name into “nasty-urchins.”
The windows of my room, directly over the parlor, were covered with a large, climbing “Baltimore Belle,” an old-fashioned small cluster rose that I never see now-a-days. From my side window I looked out on a long row of blue-blossomed agapanthus, interspersed with pink belladonnas, flowers that in summer repeated the blue of the mountains touched at sunset with pink lights.
Every night when ready for bed, I opened the inside blinds and looked at the mountains and up to the stars and enlarged my heart, for what can give one the sense of awe and beauty that the night sky does?
The location of our home on the brow of a hill was chosen because of the view and the sense of air and space. Below us was the little city, the few business blocks, the homes set in gardens on tree shaded streets, the whole surrounded by orchards and vineyards. On clear days we could see the mountains far in the east and the ocean at San Pedro, with Santa Catalina beyond.
One very rainy winter, possibly ’86, we watched the flood waters from the river creep up Aliso Street and into Alameda: we saw bridges go out and small houses float down stream. Then it was that Martin Aguierre, a young policeman, won the admiration of everyone when he rode his black horse into the torrent and rescued flood victims from floating houses and debris in mid-stream. One of the girls in my room at school lost all her clothing except what she wore, and we had a “drive” for our local flood-sufferer.
This was a very different river in summer. I once saw a woman whose nerves had been wracked by dangerous winter fordings when the water swirled about the body of the buggy, get out of her carriage, letting it ford the Los Angeles river while she stepped easily across the entire stream. She had a complex, but she didn’t know that name for her fear!
Beyond the river and up the hill on the other side stood, stark and lonely, the “Poor House,” the first unit of the present County Hospital. Many a time when the skies forbore to rain I had it pointed out to me as my probable ultimate destination; for, after the bad middle years of the seventies when to a general financial depression was added a pestilence that killed off all the lambs, and to that was added a disastrous investment in mines, the firm of Flint, Bixby & Co. was sadly shaken, and it was of great moment whether or not sufficient moisture should come to provide grass and grain for the stock. So, if the sun shone too constantly and the year wore on to Christmas without a storm the ominous words, “a dry year,” were heard and the bare building across the river loomed menacingly. But it always rained in time to save us!
Rain and overflowing rivers connote mud. Walkers on the cement sidewalks beside our paved streets little realize what wonderful mud was lost when Progress covered our adobe. With its first wetting it became very slippery on top of a hard base, but as more water fell and it was kneaded by feet and wheels, it became first like well-chewed gum and then a black porridge. I have seen signs that warned against drowning in the bog in the business center of town. An inverted pair of boots sticking out of a pile of mud in front of the old Court House once suggested that a citizen had gone in head first and disappeared.