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.

Transplant Grows Into a Convert

Though there to shore up my mother’s quake-ravaged spirits, if not her perilously sagging walls, I temporarily relocated to her condominium in the Valley with cynicism and smarting eyes.

As a gardener, I am lucky to live in a clean-air, low-traffic zone in the mountains. Mom lives close to Lankershim Boulevard at Cahuenga in North Hollywood, an intersection plotted by the same guy who laid the course for Space Mountain.

Still, to get my mother’s mind off the jigsaw jumbles of shattered wedding china and tacky bric-a-brac my brother and I, as kids, had lavished on her every Mother’s Day, I would insist we go out walking and look for signs of horticultural life in this winter of our discontent. My mother wondered whether the peripatetic earth will vanquish the work of home gardeners while more urgent needs press upon them. I wondered whether anything could actually grow in this breathless dry heat and car-befouled air.

Pink clouds of azaleas sprawling beneath exotic white Bauhinias met us early on. Just a floriferous fluke. Then, on an otherwise drab, austere lot, a perfect specimen of Rhododendron grew, smothered in lavender blooms. Interlaced among its glossy leaves were tendrils of Bougainvillea bearing raspberry red bracts.

On the neighboring lot irises were growing, cinnamon-speckled gold and champagne pink, with ball-headed Ranunculus shouting their loud, bright colors in between.

While I miss my own garden terribly, I am excited and inspired by what I’ve found in this Valley I have condescended to inhabit for a few glum months. I came to know camphor trees in winter, whose trunks glisten like obsidian in the rain, and vibrant avenues of crepe myrtle in summer. By mid-May I became a bonafide Valley booster; by August, a convert.

GLORIA IRIS GLASSER

Agoura