Mary Novaria

My husband, John, and I came back to our new home in Colorado after a week away. Before we left, the aspens in our yard had just barely started to turn. Still mostly green, a few edges of flickering coins yielding to yellow. The evergreens in the mountains around us had been spiked with patches of gold for a few weeks. We’d driven around reveling in the glory of them, looking forward to their splendor in our first fall here. But the trees in our yard and others in our neighborhood were slower to turn. I wondered why. Altitude? Moisture? Our friend Alan had told us shortly after we’d moved in that we wouldn’t believe our luck when the grove in our yard turned that spectacular, shimmering gold. We left for Kansas City the night before we’d planned because the meteorologists predicted snow. Not just an early autumn dusting, but an actual winter storm. It wasn’t even the middle of October! But what did I expect in the Rockies? Our seven years in Los Angeles had ...

My romance with LA has hit a rough patch. The affair’s not over, but I’m taking a little break to lick my wounds after yesterday’s abuse. You probably won’t be shocked to learn it involved The Freeway. Traffic is something that’s just part of the lifestyle here, which is one of the reasons we chose to live in a neighborhood where we can walk to just about everything, which I do, frequently with my little-old-lady shopping cart in tow. I’m not afraid of the freeways, I drive on them when I have to. I just don’t happen to like that aspect of the rat race.   Yesterday morning it had taken me only 35 minutes or so to get to the area called La Crescenta-Montrose, a picturesque community tucked in the hills about 30 miles north of Downtown. Little did I know when I left there at 2:15, it would be about three hours before I got home, and it wasn’t even rush hour. (There’s an oxymoron for you. Nothing rushed about it except, maybe, fury.) Courtesy of LAist.com Coming in...