That old trailer and me
Re “Abandoned homesteads fascinated me. Now my childhood home is one,” Column One, Aug. 14
Thank you so much for reporter Melody Gutierrez’s profoundly personal meditation on reckoning with the past by visiting the now-abandoned desert homestead where she spent her childhood. I was once again reminded, as I have been many times, of William Faulkner’s oft-quoted truism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Twenty-two years ago, I briefly lived in a trailer on a vacant lot in the Los Feliz hills. The trailer, unlived in during the intervening years, is still there; my razor remains on the sink where I left it in 2000. The sari fabric I bought in Artesia and made into drapes still hangs in tatters in the windows. Rain has entered through the disintegrated plastic skylights, and for a time plants grew and birds nested inside.
Worse, perhaps, for the passage of time, it sits a stark reminder of decay and change, but also of the person I once was and an indispensable part of my life.
John Bertram
Los Angeles
What a delightful vignette by Gutierrez. It sparked memories.
My parents, both eager to abandon their nomadic childhood experiences, purchased a new home in Burbank. It was 1940.
Upon my mother’s death in 2002, my daughter, using her inheritance, purchased her grandparents’ home. It still housed my senior prom dress, both my sisters’ wedding dresses and a crinoline petticoat or two. My childhood is there for me, any time I wish to visit.
In 1962, my late husband and I purchased our first home, where I remain today. There are still Barbies here, some Hot Wheels and plastic toy soldiers periodically unearthed in the backyard.
As for my mother’s reminiscences, the most curious was about Llano del Rio, a failed utopian socialist colony. Its abandoned stone ruins remain east of Palmdale, skyward of Pearblossom Highway. Her dreamer father would realize the folly of the experiment, and the family left in 1915 for more vagabond adventures.
Llano del Rio is the sole physical proof of my mother’s existential childhood. It’s one she (and we, still) could wander, and ponder the abandoned stone foundations of an earlier, hopeful time.
Maureen Di Domenico Costa Mesa