Today as I drove home over a freeway lit by daylight-saved evening sun, I remembered that I hadn't written of the recent reddish-orange evening, last week or the week before. On that day, the fog and haze were coming onto the coast, where the sun was setting in my rearview mirror, and much of the low western sky glowed orange around the reddish-orange ball of the sun. I drove towards downtown, over the Hollywood freeway which figures in some of my earliest hospital-visiting memories, and while still a ways from the downtown interchange I saw one of the flatter skyscrapers reflect the red so completely that it glowed all up and down with shiny glass iridescence. The haze put a faint echoing glow around the downtown buildings themselves, as their windows and surfaces caught the sunfire flashes. I saw palm trees silhouetted against the various glows in front, to the side, and behind, and thought, this is my home. Some people don't like L.A., but they must never have stood on the grass above the beach in Santa Monica on an evening such as this, nor even been speeding down a freeway in a car, so stereotypically, at such a moment.

copyright 2003 carrie lynn king.