The Redwood House sat at the top end of a half-acre hillside lot at the corner of Hillrose and Rosetta, in that part of the hills above Sunland about a quarter of a mile from where the pavement ended, replaced by a roadway of fine, powdery beige dust in the summer, clayey mud in the winter. The front of the house paralleled Rosetta Place, a short ridge-cresting cul-de-sac that ascended to the top of a low hill above the house, and circled the crown of it like a monk’s tonsure. Five houses on half-acre or acre properties and an empty half-acre lot with a small shed for a horse shared a Rosetta Place address.

 

Directly across from the Redwood House on the opposite corner was the Staulhusses’ place. Mr. Stalhuss worked for the city as a gardener, and their place was lush and landscaped. They kept some horses, and a dovecote, and the usual number of dogs and cats. The youngest of their children were teenagers when we moved in so we never knew them very well, although I set my personal best in Girl Scout cookie sales with Mrs. Stalhuss when their son was in the Army in Vietnam. She bought six boxes to send to him, and liked the look of them so much she bought another six boxes for herself. Their oldest daughter was married, and her daughter was in my class at Sunland Elementary.

 

Next to our house was the empty lot, and opposite that the somewhat run-down house of a rather rackety, disreputable extended family: we were civil to them, with the possible exception of the time when their teenage sons shot the mother of the pair of morning doves which nested in our grape arbor. Dad found the poor cold corpse while clearing brush and went to have a talk with the sons, and only realized after several minutes of vigorous, one-sided discussion, that the reason he had their complete, undivided attention was because he still had the sickle in his hand, and he was waving the sharpened blade in their faces. (That and some seriously profane language straight from his Army days.)

 

At the top of the hill, the last two houses had quarter-of-the-pie shaped lots, with houses at the point adjacent the road. One housed a retired couple without any children. Their name was Mathis, and they shared with us the distinction of eventually being the last families living among the ruins of the neighborhood. The other family, who kept horses and a grove of fruit trees, including a huge fruitbearing mulberry tree, had a son JPs’ age. They also had a swimming pool. We got to know the son, Wayne, and the pool pretty well.

 

Trees lined the roadside perimeters of our yard: a row of pines and small redwoods along the front, with only a small break in a fairly solid hedge of pine boughs for a brick path leading to the front door. Strangers as a rule only found the front door by accident. The original owners had planted a small grove of redwoods and other tall pines on the corner, and Mom planted this shady glade with azaleas and camellias. The driveway and the mailbox were on the Hillrose side: a row of dusty olive trees lined the fence. They bore olives, and the neighborhood had once been a large grove of trees, many of them retained in our neighbors’ yards.

 

Even ripe, the olives were as hard as bullets and left bruises; Mom finally forbade us from throwing them at each other. Once or twice a friend of Dad’s from the lab came with his family to pick and cure them in the proper Greek fashion with brine and oil. A double gate between the redwood stand and the row of olives led to short paved area and a garage, shaded by another rough-barked redwood tree that grew at a somewhat of a slant. Most people came to our house by the driveway gate, some of them astonished to find themselves at the back of Redwood House, in a litter of bicycles and Dad’s defunct auto collection, Punch the dog, a length of 1 inch rope hung from the big tree to make a swing, Tarzan fashion, and in later years, Wilson the horse.

 

The house was built late in the 1940ies, reportedly out of redwood intended for PT boat construction, but made redundant by the end of the war and picked up for a song by the original owner. It was purposely designed for the site, long and narrow, and angled to follow the hillside. The heart of it was a living room, which took the whole width of the house, centered on a fireplace on the western wall. The front door, seldom used except for formal occasions was to the right of the fireplace: a sixteen-paned picture window looked out into the tiny, narrow front garden on the left. The eastern wall was entirely of windows, and opened onto a terrace at the same level as the house, three or four shallow steps above the lawn. Mom eventually trained a Concord grape vine over a trellis to shade the terrace, and heavy clusters of grapes hung just above our heads. The grapes were tough-skinned and full of seeds, but sweet and flavorful. Grannie Jessie converted vats of them into jelly, over the years. Wasps and yellowjackets were also peskily fond of the grapes.

 

The lawn and back yard fell away down the hillside towards our downhill neighbors’ yard, another tree-lined dirt road and a low hillside with a green meadow fenced for horses opposite. Over the top of that hill were the ordinary, tightly packed suburbs of Sunland and Tujunga, a wedge bisected by the straight blade of Foothill Boulevard. Beyond that loomed Mt. Wilson and Camelback, and the Angeles National Forest, matchless in the morning when the mountains were a jagged lavender cutout against a pale sky, or in the evening when the setting sun dyed them orange and gold.

 

There was a tiny, galley kitchen tacked on, with an angled window over the sink, which overlooked the front door, useful on those rare instances when someone actually found the front door, and a door leading into the garage. It was this door which we learned how to tease the latch open with a knife-blade or a screwdriver, on those days when Mom was away when we got home from school and forgot to leave a door unlocked for us.

 

The bedrooms were off the other end of the main room. Pippy and I shared the back bedroom, next to the bathroom, which looked to the back of the house, and consequently was lighter and sunnier then the other two, whose windows opened to the front, and the deep pine hedge. JP and eventually Sander shared one, and my parents shared a foldout sofa in the smallest and dimmest, which doubled as a den, as most of the books were shelved there in bookshelves made of finished plank and concrete blocks.

 

This was where we lived while hippies and the Beatles roamed the earth, and moon rockets and the Tet offensive were launched, but only one of those had any direct effect upon us, as far as we could see.