what Dorothy saw...

Our house was set partway up a narrow, curving, hillside street that was just a block long and my mother said she fell in love with it the first time she stood at the kitchen sink and looked out the window. The view was mainly north, down the street, across nearby rooftops to the foothills where, decades later, the Getty Museum would become a stark white presence. You couldn’t see the house across the street, just the steep slope it sat on, which was carpeted with ice plant.

Arcing high above the house in its journey over Southern California, the sun never reached into the window but glanced across the small front yard and the neighborhood and cast a light that Dorothy would paint a thousand times.

The kitchen was her domain and the window her throne. From her spot at the sink, she would call out bright hellos to passing neighbors and scream at anyone, friend or stranger or unaccompanied beast, who dared to set foot on the mounded ivy in the front yard. Hearing the first note of her rising ire, I would shuffle away in embarrassment, hoping not to be seen, not to be associated with her screeching from the window, which was a joke among the neighbors that would surely rub off on me, compounding my already awkward existence. There was no sidewalk on the other side of the street, so people would clutch their dogs’ collars as they made their way past the house or even walk them on the dangerous blind curve to prevent the chance sniff that might launch Dorothy’s operatic alarms.

But even as generations of children and dogs — and I — left the neighborhood, even as her vision diminished, her voice grew weak and her legs would no longer hold her upright at the sink, the view continued to captivate her. When at last, at 88, she moved from the house, willing to leave behind most of her worldly possessions and more than fifty years of history, it was not my father, or the neighborhood, or the trespassing dogs she talked about, but the view from the kitchen window.

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