Barbara King

AGAIN THIS morning I heard my next-door neighbors speaking in loud voices to each other, more like shouts, and again I wondered if one of them might not have bad ears. I know a lot about their mornings. Today they're going to make a full pot of coffee to last through the afternoon. That's why he bought the bigger coffee maker, he reminds her, so she doesn't have to "repeat." They probably know my music and maybe my laughter or even the color of the T-shirt I've slept in. Our levered windows are flung wide to let in the early light and the still-cool air.

On a conspicuous corner of Wilshire Vista, passersby slow down, stop, take a closer look, break into smiles. The house before them bursts onto the landscape with the mad exuberance of a Mardi Gras float, vibrating with life force in the midst of the monotonous rows of buff and putty stuccos that line the streets of this mid-city neighborhood.

"Let's go sit on the divan in the breezeway," my mother's friend directed us when we went for a summer afternoon visit. Divan. Breezeway. I was a preschool small-town southerner, already captivated by the sound of words to take me places I couldn't otherwise go. A ceiling fan flung balmy air around the screened room, a room like I'd never seen before -- or, I should say, furniture like I'd never seen before, big fat pieces with bright, leafy upholstery and rounded strips of wood that curved and swooped in the most impossible way.

The inimitable, audaciously confident New York decorator Dorothy Draper advised us way back in the '30s that the world was full of beautiful colors to choose from, so we ought to pick the ones we like the best and just throw them together. "Your own taste, resourcefulness and independence will carry you through," she wrote in her book "Decorating Is Fun!" Above all, she insisted: "Never be afraid of color."