Best and Worsts / Valley Reader Write : Tributes Tell Why Valley Is Home

Couched as it was with reminders of the earthquake, the wildfires and the sagging economy, our question to readers was simple: Why do you stay in the San Fernando Valley?

In dozens of poems, essays and even a limerick, written on manual typewriters, computers or scrawled on note cards, you responded, defiantly defending your neighborhood, your strip mall, your Valley.

For some, it is the memories that keep you here: of orange groves, farmlands or the deer that once roamed the Valley floor. For others, it is as simple as the convenience of nearby malls or the endlessly sunny days. Others point to something less tangible, a collective spirit that rises in the face of each new disaster.

But we asked for your words, so we’ll let you explain. Here are some of our favorite remarks, illustrated with photographs by Brian Vander Brug about why there’s no place quite like the Valley to call home.

Back Yard Our Own Little Garden of Eden

One of the treats I received each Christmas as a child in Omaha was a large, shiny navel orange grown in California.

Savoring each slice with the tangy sweet juice dripping from my lips, I would try to imagine a magical far-off place that produced such a wonder in the wintertime.

To my great excitement and joy, our family did move to Southern California in 1928 when I was 11 years old. As Father drove our car on the highway from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, we gaped at the numerous picture postcard groves of orange trees nestled at the foot of snow-capped mountains. We saw fields of grapevines and stately palm trees. Paradise on earth.

When my husband and I established our home in the San Fernando Valley in 1950, we planted an orchard in our back yard with orange, lemon, peach, apricot, plum and fig trees. We erected a grape arbor that cascaded with Concord and Thompson seedless grapes.

Additionally, we planted a garden patch of vegetables, surrounded by rose bushes and other flowers. It was so easy to grow things. We would never go hungry.

We are old now and several of our trees have died, as have fruit trees elsewhere in the Valley, displaced by concrete. Still, what we like best in the Valley is what we have preserved for ourselves in our own back yard--a bit of the Garden of Eden.

VIRGINIA HENDRICKSON

Van Nuys

Focus: ‘ Still, what we like best in the Valley is what we have preserved for ourselves in our own back yard--a bit of the Garden of Eden. ‘

Virginia Hendrickson

Van Nuys