Outdoor -- and indoor -- pleasures

Here WE ARE, in the vellum of another dusty, carbon-coated sunset. Tuscany with too many cars, that’s what L.A. is. Tuscany on steroids.

Of course, we’re holding our breath that the house down the block finally sells -- three months and counting, yikes. Places like that used to move quicker than Lindsay Lohan’s shot glass. Now we wait months. Don’t buyers know about the great schools? Don’t they know how I’d put their trash cans away when they’re on vacation? Seemingly, they don’t.

A good neighborhood is a hundred little gestures, a cold beer at the right moment, the leathery scent of steaks grilling three doors down. Our neighbors are great, which runs contrary to the L.A. archetype. One brings over a new puppy to introduce. Others stop by to offer up their pool on hot days -- any time, they say. It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t show up on a real estate brochure.

“If you need a hand, just yell,” calls Randy from next door.

Randy’s referring to the new fence I’m putting up along the side yard. Our 4-year-old, a serial nudist, likes to strip off his clothes at the oddest times, and who knows what his big brother does when we’re not around. So we’ve put up a little fence ($2,000, materials alone). We justify the expense by telling ourselves that it’ll pay off if we ever have to sell.

Maybe I’m wrong, but every upgrade we make seems based on what it does to the future sales price of our house. Me, I just want a little place in which to read the Sports section or watch a ballgame on TV.

That’s all I ask of a house, shelter from the sun and the rain, a place to hide from old girlfriends who, by the way, are really starting to ripen about now. In your memory, the girls you used to know are all about 19, with custard hair and legs from here to Albuquerque. But in reality, they are all pressing 50 and just entering their prime. Which is why you have to hide.

Anyway, I’m house humble, never aspiring to more than a few bedrooms and a decent den. Houses can be too big, you know. They can swallow you whole.

Still, we pour money into this place (formerly a House of Pancakes). We spend gobs of cash on little things you’d never really notice: orchid fertilizer and oil-base primer. Flagstone and sprinkler heads. We just shelled out $300 for dirt. Yep, dirt.

Have you seen the stuff that passes for dirt around here? The arid Southern California topsoil they sell is made up of sand, hair clippings and ground-up cardboard boxes.

Honestly, for all its natural gifts, California seems to be soil impaired. Back East, the grit they wash from their cars has more nutrients. Were it not for the perfect sun, the sublime temps and the fried oysters they serve at R23, I would’ve fled this dusty desert town a decade ago.

Desert or not, I still find pleasure working in the backyard, for it lets you spend time with wildlife other than your own children.

I particularly like to watch the squirrels chasing one another round and round the olive trees. You can learn a lot from a squirrel if you’d only pay attention. A squirrel enjoys every moment.

Doves too. I was watching a couple of doves make love the other day and picked up a few tricks. What I noticed about doves is how thoughtful they can be, how they like to nuzzle before and after sex. Coo-coo-coo. They just exude love, doves do. The number of doves never shows up in real estate brochures either.

As far as my wife, Posh, and I go, intimacy is never this serene. For nearly 25 years, our love life has been compromised by the dysfunctional sleeping habits of our dear children -- the three older ones first, and now the youngest one, who has inherited their habit of running into our bedroom, complaining about bad dreams. Damn you, Harry Potter, and your dark, creepy trailers. You’re messing with my marriage, little dude.

“I don’t even know how you had kids,” says my buddy Paul, referring to the constant interruptions.

Paul speculates that my wife laid the eggs and I later swam over them, much like a sockeye salmon. We never had to physically touch, he says, though for the record I do remember Posh slapping me recently, probably to stop my rants about what’s become of the bond market.

Or was that foreplay? I won’t even attempt to guess. Because the sun’s going down and I’ve got flower beds to fill. And steaks to barbecue.

My Tuscany awaits. Coo-coo-coo . . .

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.