In Praise of the Endless Summer

Every summer I travel to New Hampshire, where I grew up, and every summer I hear the same remarks about Los Angeles, a place 99% of the people who make the remarks have never visited. “Different strokes for different folks,” they shrug, using the tone of voice they might use to talk about cannibalism. One man this year, upon learning that I was visiting from Southern California, actually made the sign of the cross in front of my face, as if warding off a hex.

But perhaps the remark I hear most is a pitying, “Don’t you miss the four seasons?” The answer is, frankly, no. New Hampshire has its charms, but to my mind they are only available from June through September. I know there are people who thrive when the sun sets at 3:30 in the afternoon, who find it a happy challenge to drive on roads made treacherous by glare ice, who do not entertain daily thoughts of suicide at the prospect of spending two-thirds of their lives housebound because they risk frostbite if they step outdoors--people, in other words, who enjoy New England winters. I am not one of them.

In all my most vivid childhood memories, I am shivering. For the better part of the year, I waited for the school bus in weather so cold my teeth ached, stood outside at recess stamping my feet and came home to a mother who was a throwback to another, hardier age, a woman who considered it perfectly normal for citizens of the 20th century to inhabit a house the temperature of an igloo. At night, I climbed between sheets that felt as if they’d been stored in a refrigerator and, in the morning, woke to a room whose air had the raw bite of the tundra. One fairy tale character in particular had a devastating hold on my psyche: Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, the gentle street urchin who froze to death on New Year’s Eve.

Those long, bleak winters, interspersed with the ephemeral days of summer, shaped a world view that I have spent most of my adult life trying to change. They made me believe in a God who made you earn every happy moment by imposing a hundred moments of misery, someone who snatched things away just as your fingers closed around them, someone with a block of ice in the socket reserved for a warm, beating heart.

Those winters are a big part of the reason that, seven years ago, I moved with my husband to a place where, by Eastern standards, it is summer all the time. They are part of the reason we are still here, despite the fact that, for many months, everything about Los Angeles seemed alien, inscrutable and disorienting.

We ended up renting a stucco box of a house in Palms, a dreary part of town that, with its grids of identical rectangular apartment buildings and identical landscapes of azaleas and impatiens, resembled the outskirts of an airport. We were lonely and broke and afraid that we had made a mistake. But on the south side of that nondescript house, a camellia bloomed that first uncertain February, tipsy with flowers, flowers so pink and lush they made me want to throw a party. Such wanton abundance! In New England, spring was heralded by a single demure crocus pushing from a crust of snow.

Besides the camellia, the yard was bare; the previous tenants had used the lawn, which was as hard and dry as concrete, for a driveway. It seemed impossible that anything could take root, but inspired by a succession of balmy days, I turned on the rusty sprinkler every night. After a few weeks, a soft shroud of green appeared, which eventually needed mowing. We sent away for seeds and bulbs, dug up flower beds, bought Jerusalem sage, evening primrose, coral bells. We planted dusty miller and pansies around the tree on the far side of the walk. We filled flower boxes with dwarf stock and marigolds and started a compost heap.

Febrile with enthusiasm, we began to think of vegetables. We had no back yard--a rectangle of cramped apartments crowded right up to our door--so we dug another patch up front, stuck a square of chicken wire in the ground and planted sugar snap peas, a bumper crop whose vines were 8 feet high. Collards grew like kudzu. We put in squash, tomatoes and cukes, and wondered if the law forbade keeping a goat. On weekends, in the midst of this bounty, we dragged our lawn chairs out front and read in the sun like a couple of hayseeds. My husband sometimes wore his carpenter’s overalls and dispensed farming advice to curious passersby. We met everyone on our block that way.

We lived in that house for two years. Three months after we moved, to east of La Brea, we drove by the old place and everything we had planted was dead. But it didn’t matter; that house, that yard, had already sustained us, already unleashed a new capacity for joy, already given us a taste of that weird mixture of anonymity and intimacy, so characteristic of L.A., that made us want to stay.

Over the past five years we have experienced the usual things: major surgery, career changes, aging parents. We have, in other words, done what just about everyone does here: carved out a day-to-day life that is, in most respects, very much like the lives of the people who think Los Angeles embodies the teachings of the antichrist. I am happier now than I ever was back East, and though it would be far too simplistic to attribute this to the climate, I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I no longer live where summers are fleeting interludes of happiness for which winter is the terrible, inexorable price. I have never learned to refrain from exclaiming, “Isn’t it gorgeous out?” to natives who meet my enthusiasm with bored, blank stares. I have never quite lost the feeling of having stumbled, undeservedly, upon an outrageous piece of luck, an endlessly self-replenishing pot of gold. There is something in this of the immigrant’s dream fulfilled, and part of me still lives with the immigrant’s lingering fear that some morning there will be a knock on the door and they’ll make me go back home.

On any given day in, say, November or January or March, when people back East are getting snow down their necks and scraping ice from their windshields, when here, sunlight the color of honey streams down the golden canyons like a benediction, I sometimes think that, in Los Angeles, the story of the Little Match Girl has been rewritten. This time her father doesn’t beat her, and she doesn’t freeze to death. They don’t find her thinly clad body, blue with cold, on New Year’s Day. This time the visions of the gleaming stove, the fragrant goose, the Christmas tree with its candles like stars streaking across the sky do not fade in the time it takes a match to burn out. Instead, they are resurrected, day after perfect day, as our simplest, most essential blessings: Light. Food. Warmth.