Geography

An old mapmaker of local renown

roams a narrow beach between the sea

and sheer cliff  that forms a promontory

on the outskirts of this coastal town.

He shakes his fist and shouts at the sea,

berating the waves that batter the shore,

drown his words with a thunderous roar,

and threaten his published geography

     with a watery blasphemy.

Towering above him, the stone-faced crag

watches his antics, impassive and dour,

its creviced face like a furrowed brow,

resigned to the tide’s inevitable drag,

the superior force of the ocean’s invasion.

The mapmaker’s shouts drift away and float,

abob like timbers from a shipwrecked boat,
on an ocean impervious to rhetorical persuasion. 

Our Home

by Susan Cameron

I really like our home. It's a cheerful, inviting place, and most of my thirty-three years' worth of memories here are good ones. But things change. I no longer own the business that's a mere half-mile commute away. The neighbors I liked are gone or dead. This evening I put a can of graffiti remover and a roll of paper towels in a plastic bag and took a walk around my neighborhood, cleaning up four little patches of wannabee gangsta bullshit written on sidewalks and posts -- thanks for the new continuation school three blocks away, Orange County! Appreciate it!

Selling the house this year is out of the question; the bank repo across the street will screw up the comps for sure. I'm betting the ranch (house) on a comeback in a year or two like everybody else -- hope we are all not wrong.

But another part of the reason for dragging my feet is, I've been here so long I've grown roots deeper than my Cecile Brunner roses. I know the pricey-and-good restaurants, the cheap-and-good restaurants, the places with nice patios and tables where you can write. I know some of the hidden staircases down the cliffs of Laguna and Corona del Mar, the most likely places to find a parking spot at the beaches, even on Balboa Island in summer. I know good thrift stores and bookstores and coffeehouses, and I've walked around marinas and beaches from San Clemente and Dana Point to Seal Beach and over the border into Los Alamitos Bay and Naples Island and Belmont Shores, and I still don't know everything about this place. I'm still not tired of it. Above all, I've made good friends here, and I'd hate to lose them.

And here's the other thing: I went to five elementary schools by the fifth grade. I got my own place when I was seventeen and moved eleven times in five years before moving here. Amazing, eleven moves in five years, always looking for nicer places with cheaper rents and better roommates. It's not quite as tough as it sounds; most of the time, what I owned fit in my car. The first time I had to rent a little U-Haul trailer, I was sort of pleased. I'd finally acquired a piece or two of furniture and was a solid citizen.

Anyhow, once I hit Orange County, I planted roots and would not be budged. Still have not. I love to travel, but I also love coming home. I love to drive up and see the house and flowers and trees. I turn the key in the lock and there are the comfortable chairs, my pretty paintings, green plants and candles, and I'm home.

Could we make a home someplace else? Of course. Could I be happy living someplace else? I'm sure of it. And someday we will move, whether obnoxious neighbors finally prompt it, or economics, or my husband's desire for less crowded surroundings, or just the wheel of change slowly turning and taking me with it.

On my last trip to Detroit, I made a pilgrimage to all the places I'd lived. The house in which I spent years nine through seventeen had been painted charcoal gray and looked as grim on the outside as it had been on the inside. Most of the places I'd rented were battered and forlorn, and one of my favorites (the one with beveled glass windows and mahogany woodwork and ivy growing over the kitchen window) had vanished entirely. There was grass growing on the empty lot where it had stood, and there were three or four other vacant lots just like it on the block. It seems the City of Detroit had decided it was better to raze the abandoned houses that were being used as crack dens, fill the basements with dirt, and plant grass. Less chance of liability for the city, slightly less crime for the few remaining neighbors to deal with. I drove around the ruins of Coplin, Lakepointe, Evanston, Hampshire, Hazelridge -- crazy white girl risking her present just to look at her past.

People in Detroit in the 1950's would have thought the destruction of their city impossible. Twenty years from now, will I come back to Fountain Valley for a final farewell tour and find my beloved old home trashed or gone? No lie, that would be a tragedy. That would break my heart.

Meanwhile, I'll be out there in the neighborhood with my can of Goof-Off, helping to preserve the home that is still mine.

copyright 2011, Susan Cameron

The Lay of the Land

You've heard from Cassie many times before but never had a proper introduction - to her and her sales office. Here goes.

My name is Cassie and I sell new homes. If you think that sounds like I’m introducing myself at a 12-step meeting, you wouldn’t be far off. I could use a 12-step program to break the hold this job has on me. But I’m not here to talk about myself. It’s all about the homes I’m selling. My new neighborhood is called Bella Vista and it’s three miles from the ocean in the Southern California community of Cantata Del Mar.

Let me give you the lay of the land first, so you have your bearings.

My models and sales office sit on a hilltop. I can see the ocean straight out the back windows and rolling natural hills to the right. Sometimes those hills are lush green and bursting with wildflowers, but most of the time they are brown and tinder dry. Families of deer live out there, and coyotes, mountain lions, mice, snakes and lots of birds, all of them probably a little miffed by what we’re doing to their neighborhood to make room for families of people. Sometimes I feel sorry for them.

Right below me are the first four phases (Lower Bella Vista), and above the model street are Phases 5 and 6 (Upper Bella Vista). Phase 7 is the model street. When all those are sold, two houses will be built here where my sales office is now, and I’ll move on to another neighborhood.

The Bella Vista sales office is really a doublewide trailer dressed up to look like a homey living room with a sofa and two chairs on one side, a cozy rattan table and chairs on the opposite side. Right smack dab in the middle sits a large dark wood waist-high table with a glass top that houses a topographic model of our neighborhood. We call it the topo table.

People like to hang around the topo table to talk about our homes. They lean over the edge and stare down at the little scale model houses and streets and trees as if they would come to life at any second. Sometimes I find myself doing that, too. Only I imagine myself being far away from there instead of living on one of those streets like the customers do.

Behind the topo table is a credenza and behind that is a matching file cabinet where we keep the tools of our trade: brochures, price sheets, exterior color schemes, geology reports and so on. Flanking the file cabinet are the two large picture windows with a view of Lower Bella Vista, the ocean and hills.

The blue and cream color scheme is meant to feel beachy and happy. We call the look breezy. Potted palms and orchids are placed around the room to bring the outside in. It’s all about making the customers feel at home.

Originally, the carpet was a buttery color. I took one look at it and knew we were in for trouble, but the Marketing VP – I call her Skinny Bitch - and the designers were oohing and aahing over it so much that I didn’t stand a chance of getting it changed to something more practical that would withstand the thousands of footsteps a sales office carpet endures.

We weren’t even open for business yet when someone tracked wet tar from the newly paved parking lot onto that creamy carpet. That’s why I have Joe the Carpet Cleaner on speed dial. He gave the carpet its first scrub that night. I battled to keep the carpet from looking like wet sand, until the CEO came through one day with investors and took me aside to comment on the filthy carpet. How embarrassing! Anyway, that’s when I finally convinced Skinny Bitch that we needed to replace the carpet with something darker. Now it’s a color with the unfortunate name of “Dirt”, which isn’t as breezy but doesn’t show the traffic.

On either end of the main room is an office. The one to the right as you come in from the parking lot is Sarah’s, and the larger one on the left, looking out to the ocean, is mine. We each have a window looking out to the sales office, so we can see when someone is there and needs help.

One set of double French doors leads to the parking lot, and the other goes out to our four model homes. If you make a mistake and go out the model door to get to your car, you’ll have to come back through, because the whole area is fenced in. We call it the trap. That’s not to say you’re really trapped out there, just that you’d need to vault the fence to obtain your freedom. Plenty of people do that instead of coming back through the office. Some people will do anything to avoid talking to a salesperson.

Sometimes we’d like to avoid them, too, especially the rude obnoxious ones. That’s what the panic room is for. It’s our safe place, the room with a lockable door where we can go to escape. Really, it’s a storeroom where we keep our documents and office supplies, our fax and copier, the water cooler and little fridge that cools our lunches and cream for our tea. Our indispensable jar of Hershey’s miniature chocolates is safe there, too. But the best thing about the panic room is that it is the perfect hiding place when someone who makes us crazy drives up. I will admit right now that I’ve closed myself up in the panic room a few times when I’ve seen Skinny Bitch coming. You just don’t want to waste your time with some people.

The last room in our sales office is the bathroom. Since we have a separate public restroom, I always lock this bathroom and reserve it for the sales staff. After some of the things I’ve seen the general public do to a bathroom, I’m determined to have a haven for us in our private moments. We’ve decorated it with soft lights and potpourri to create a relaxing environment. We’ve dubbed it “The Spa”, because Sarah opened the bathroom door one day and said, “Wow, it’s like a spa in here.” And so it is. And that’s the way it’s going to stay. I think every workplace needs a little spa, don’t you?

So there you have it – the Bella Vista sales office – my home away from home.

Now, can we get down to business?

Copyright 2011 by Liz Zuercher