Red, Green and Blues

Early January is like Big Monday. It's that time of year when the long weekend of Christmas and various holidays feel like a thousand miles behind us already and the work week of the next twelve months looms in the most discouraging way possible. Southern California, done with the winter rush less than a month into actual winter, is ready to go back to the relative seasonlessness that we think of as so specific and that makes us the envy of a cold, cold nation that at this point has absolutely no choice in the matter of climate (especially these days).

One of the ways I marked the end/beginning was to help to take down the decorations on the forty or so tree trunks on my block. Trimming the tree trunks with foil, ribbon, wreaths and/or candy canes is an annual chore carried out by our famously fractious block club. I volunteered to head up the decorating committee, which meant that on the appointed Saturday last month I was the only full-time hand who showed up on one end of the block with a truck dolly loaded with foil and other paraphernalia. A few folk who saw me bending and stooping took pity on me and pitched in for a while--a neighbor girl, the neighbor next to her who had an hour to spare before her mother-in-law came to town. I grumbled about the whole experience to my husband and swore, again, to quit the club. No community spirit and all that. I threw my discontent before that that eternal, fruitless question: Why can't Inglewood be more like El Segundo/Beverly Hills/Pasadena/Culver City? (Answer: because it's not any of those places.)

But I have to say, I was proud of my handiwork. Walking the block each morning with my dogs, I re-inspected the decorations, admiring the red and silver uniformity of it all that made our block appear much cozier and more cohesive than it really it is. I quickly loved the illusion, reveled in it. I protected it: when the post-storm winds tore some of the foil from the ribbon that was supposed to keep it in place, I immediately went out with staples and thumb tacks to repair the damage. I constantly compared the trees on my street to the decorated trees on other streets (there's more El Segundo/Beverly Hills in Inglewood than I tend to remember) and thought our look was more subtle, yet more festive. I started to feel downright superior.

And then it was time for all the stuff to come down and for our block to turn back into an autumn--a seasonless-- pumpkin. The only consolation I felt was in the fact that taking all that foil off was a hell of a lot easier than putting it on. At the block club meeting that convened just before the end of '09, the usual handful who came applauded me loudly for the "beautiful job" I'd done decorating the trees. The praise was somehow surprising. But it was undeniably warming. It felt like real winter all over again.