THORNS


There may be a more smiling hill-top than "La Collina Ridente" somewhere
on the Southern California edge of the Pacific Ocean, but deep down in
my heart I don't believe that there is. It is just the right size
hill-top--except when I first began to drive the motor, and then it
seemed a trifle small for turning around. It's just high enough above
the coast highway and the town to give us seclusion, and it's just far
enough from the waves to be peaceful. It used to be called "Suma
Paz"--perfect peace--but we changed the name, that being so unpleasantly
suggestive of angels, and, anyway, there isn't such a thing. If "The
Smiling Hill-Top" were everything it seems on a blue and green day like
to-day, for instance, it would be a menace to my character. I should
never leave, I should exist beautifully, leading the life of a
cauliflower or bit of seaweed floating in one of the pools in the rocks,
or to be even more tropically poetic, a lovely lotus flower! I should
not bother about the children's education or grieve over J----'s
bachelor state of undarned socks and promiscuous meals, or the various
responsibilities I left behind in town, so it is fortunate that there
are thorns. Every garden, from Eden down, has produced them.

I haven't catalogued mine, I have just put them down "higgledy-piggledy,"
as we used to say when we were children. J----'s having to work in town,
too far to come home except for an occasional week-end, the neighbors'
dogs, servants, Bermuda grass, tenants, ants, the eccentricities of an
adobe road during the rains, and the lapses of the delivery system of
the village. Of course they are of varying degrees of unpleasantness.
J----'s absence is horrid but the common lot, so I have accepted it