postcard-from-l-a: A house where come-and-go is a constant and it snows wiffle balls

There are still signs of life in this old house. The basketball nesting in the sunny new mums. The scratches the dog leaves on the front door, where he paws to get in every time someone starts to cook bacon.

In the bathroom, there is toothpaste where there should be grout. Outside, the stucco has crow’s feet, and the rain gutters are full of wiffle balls. Eat. Sleep. Hit.

Doesn’t help that our place is really more terminus than house. Kids come, kids go. The college grad finally moved to Brentwood, but she’s not really there much. She bunks with us when her roommate is out of town, or she bunks with us when it is too late for the long drive across town, or she bunks with us when “Scandal” is on and she and her mother fall asleep on the couch like the happy couple they are.

And when she leaves, it is usually with a bag of supplies her mother insists on: organic grapes, organic Kleenex. Little by little, she is looting the place.

“I have friends who are crazier than me,” she reminded us the other day while stealing some sweaters.

Not many.

“Is adoption still an option?” I ask my wife, Posh.

“For which one?” she asks.

All of ‘em. We have four. Make an offer. We’ve priced the older ones a little higher, presumably because they know how to reset the Wi-Fi.

The other day, I spent what should’ve been happy hour planting flowers in the front garden. Where once there were barren stretches, there are now flowers the color of low-priced Japanese sedans.

Please don’t PC me with your drought warnings. These are modest little gardens, and besides, we did it right, filling our flowerbeds with mostly heat-tolerant species and broken waffle irons.

No sooner am I done, than a stray basketball ka-pozzles the brand new mums.

“Oops,” explains one of the boys.

“My neck!” scream the mums.

Among the other signs of life at our house is the little dead space in the frontyard where the boys stand when they play wiffle ball. One is 11, the other 28 — the rookie and the beast. You’ve got to appreciate multi-generational childplay like that.

Almost every late afternoon, they turn the yard into their private Fenway and send screaming line drives across the lawn and occasionally off the neighbor’s bridal-white BMW. Generally, German cars can withstand such blows. But still.

This being L.A., I keep expecting the neighbor to shoot them, because here cars are more valuable than kids. More than children, cars define us. They also never talk back.

“Don’t hit the car,” I warn them.

“OK.”

Ka-boooooom!

Eat. Sleep. Hit.

They have never broken a window, our boys, who play as if it’s the seventh game of the World Series. But they have broken everything else. Every few days, they’ll shank a sensor and the garage door won’t close. Around them, the sprinkler heads seem as though they are made of the same tender filament as light bulbs.

Our boys even broke a brick. Don’t know how many pound-feet of pressure it takes to break a brick, but they broke one, off the lower tier that rings the house like mortared wainscoting. Not sure if they drove a car into it or maybe hit it with their foreheads, but the brick crumbled and now needs to be replaced by someone adept with a chisel.

Are there people like that anymore? All I seem to know are entertainment lawyers and wealth investment advisors, who are geniuses at certain things but famously not good at fixing stuff that actually matters. That they can even work chopsticks always sort of amazes me. So I guess I will fix it myself, this latest sign of life.

A family home seems always in a state of disrepair, vibrating with life like a guitar string, especially when there are kids still at play. When that ends, we will sell this house full of wiffle balls and dog scratches and, like most everybody else, finally move down closer to the beach, where the schools are worse but the breezes are better.

That will be a little sad, frankly. No more sonic ka-booms. No more basketballs in the mums.