California morning.

Early this morning I took my Lawless Hound on a walk past my Dream Home (the one in Los Feliz, not the one in the English countryside). It was another cloudless brilliant morning, a brisk, vivid 55 degrees. I pulled an orange off a branch that hung over a fence, and its scent on my fingers and when I punctured the rind with my fingernail was the sharp, sunny tang that is the very essence of optimism, the Platonic ideal of citrus. Nothing like those neutered plastic perfectly uniform orbs in the chilly produce section. This orange blushed tangerine on one side and faded to lemon on the other and just smelling its wild tartness made me salivate. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister Mary in their house on Plum Creek, when neighborly Mr. Edwards risked his life crossing a raging winter river to bring them Christmas trinkets and one orange each. Maybe this is what those prelapsarian oranges smelled like.

Before I got in my car to go to work, I looked up to the end of my street and saw, above the waving palms, the Griffith Observatory blindingly white in the intensely blue sky, beneath an insouciant little horsetail cloud.













I confess that I think of it as my own personal Observatory. I felt a protective panic on its behalf during the Griffith Park fire two springs ago – we stood in the street and watched the raging wall of flame leap high behind its domes.









The next morning I nearly cried with relief to see that it was still there. It’s my beacon – when I’ve been away from home, and I see it with its Art Deco pilasters there on its hillside getting closer, it gives me a thrill of happiness. I bet there are a lot of us who feel that way, people who can look up from their driveways and see it squatting placid and glorious just above us on the hill.

I was jealous to see news and pictures of the snowstorm that blanketed London earlier this week – I miss the muffled hush of snow, how it shuts adult life down, business and transportation, and gives people license to play. I miss the cold that makes being indoors and drinking tea by a fire so delicious. But on a morning like this, southern California has its charms.

Photo credits: Shutterberry; AP/Matt Sayles.