BLUE SKIES: L.A.'S FIVE DAYS OF WINTER

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S
THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL

This is adapted from an essay published many years ago in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine. That was when newspapers paid a dollar a word. That was when newspapers published essays. That was when the L.A. Times had a Sunday Magazine...

Since I'm going back in a few weeks--and spoke yesterday to my ex-husband, who lives on the New Hampshire coast and reported that his cousin Jeremy's thermometer in Vermont read 35 below the other morning--this seemed a good time to haul it out. And as he also noted: "These winter days, with the light sparkling off the ice and the trees and the stillness, are the most beautiful days of the year"... 

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 feel called upon to make the remarks have never seen. "Different strokes for different folks," they shrug, in the same tone of voice a person might use if asked to say something neutral about cannibalism. "Better you than me!" they chuckle uneasily, and avert their eyes, the way you do at the sight of blood. 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 frequently 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 mostly available from June through September. I know there are people who thrive during months when the sun sets at three-thirty 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 the full length of a New England winter--but 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 schoolbus in weather so cold my teeth ached, stood hunched in the cold at recess 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 twentieth 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 achingly 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 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.

They are a big part of the reason that, twenty years ago, I moved with my (now-ex) husband to a place where, by Eastern standards, it is summer all the time. They are partly the reason that I, for one, am still here, in spite of the fact that, for many long months, everything about Los Angeles seemed alien and inscrutable and disorienting. We searched in vain for a center, something to help us get our bearings, but there were no parks, no open spaces, no plazas or commons like the ones we were used to.

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, identically landscaped with azaleas and impatiens, resembled the outskirts of an airport. We were lonely and broke and afraid we had made a mistake; had been rash to move so far away from everything we knew. But on the south side of that nondescript house, a camellia bloomed that first uncertain February, tipsy with flowers that spoke of mystery, promise, hope; flowers so pink and lush they made me want to throw a party. Such wanton abundance--in February!--while 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 in it but, inspired by the succession of balmy days and the friendly, encouraging warmth of the sun, 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 flowerboxes 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 eight feet high. Collards grew like kudzu. We put in squash, tomatoes and cukes, and wondered if municipal law forbade the keeping of goats. 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 the “east side,” we drove by the old place and everything we had planted was dead. But it didn't matter, then; that house, that yard, had already sustained us, already unleashed a new capacity for hope, already given us a taste of that strange combination of anonymity and intimacy so characteristic of L.A. that made us want to stay.

Over the next several years we experienced the usual things people experience: major surgery, career changes, aging parents. We did, in other words, what just about everyone who lives here does: 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 anti-Christ. Much as I love the New England seacoast, I’m probably “happier” here, and though it would be far too simplistic to attribute this to the climate, I am still overwhelmed with gratitude that I no longer live in a place where summers are fleeting interludes of happiness for which winter is the terrible, inexorable, endless price.

I have even become grateful for the frigid winters I endured for 38 years, because the memory of them makes California weather seem continually miraculous in a way I am not sure is possible for those who were born and bred here. 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 learned that L.A. does have seasons—even if, as my landscape architect friend Judy notes, winter lasts about five days. I have never quite lost the feeling of having stumbled, undeserving, 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, she doesn't freeze to death, they don't find her thinly-clad corpse, 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 down. Instead, they are resurrected, day after perfect day, as our simplest, most essential blessings: Light. Food. Warmth.

WILDWOOD CANYON
photo: Seaotter71