"I'm coming to get you," Bianca called to announce on Sunday.  "Lily's coming too."

Possibly as a ruse to get me out and away from my research on the servant problem (see previous posts), or because we had both seen A Single Man, my dear friend and co-conspirator Bianca had decided we needed a trip to Santa Monica Canyon where she felt sure she would be able to find the house where Christopher Isherwood used to live.  Along the way, she took the opportunity to show me many other points of interest, since this part of Los Angeles was where she had spent her formative years. 

"Hello, you've got the arrow," she reprimanded the car in front of us as we took a very hard right off San Vicente and plunged down the steep winding descent of Entrada Drive.  "There's my school," she said, waving at a blur as we careened downhill.  "That used to be a gas station where we'd go buy candy," she added as a small building swept by whose vaguely Art Deco lines hinted at a former existence.  A scent of jasmine and ocean whipped our faces as I clutched Lily in my arms in case she might attempt to leap out the open window .

"She's had half a Benadryl," Bianca explained of the tiny creature who I then realized was placidly enjoying the ride with a slightly glazed look in her eyes.  "There's the Uplifter Club," Bianca said after several more turns. "We would go there and order butterscotch sundaes.  Butterscotch."  She sighed.  "Johnny Weismuller used to live over there," she added.  A few more curves and bends and ups and downs and we came to a stop in a wooded glade.

We got out and Lily stumbled off to inspect some low-lying foliage.  The afternoon light was flashing brilliant gold against the trees at the top of the canyon far above us.  "It was always colder down here than anywhere else," my tour-guide and friend observed.

"A microclimate," I suggested.  "The redwoods..."

"Cold," Bianca summarized.  "Over there's a creek, where those houses are now."  She regarded the structures with faint disapproval.  "We used to ride our horses here and pretend to be cowboys."  I looked around appreciatively, trying to imagine a teenaged girl in this shady woodsy place but with less houses.  Living very far away from the places I grew up, I am especially curious about how it must feel to be an older self in the place where a young self used to live and play, and ride horses.  And go to school barefoot, she tells me.

"How does it feel?" I ask.  "To be here now?"

"Where's our house?" she asks instead of answering.  She looks around to get her bearings, searching out landmarks.  We walk a little further and she stops.  "That," she says, indicating a clapboard edifice behind some shrubbery and a wall, "used to be the garage.  And that," she adds, "was the guest house."  We continue on our way and she directs my attention up the steep hillside.  "There," she tells me.  "That was the studio.  That was my room."

A small shingled cottage sits above us, nestled in a thicket of trees against the slope.  You can almost not see it.  The main house is hidden behind the newer structure closer to the road where we are standing. 

"Like a treehouse," I say.  "And an artist's garret at the same time."

"It's where I did so many things, you know, for the first time," she observes, looking up at the little house perched in the trees.  She does not elaborate.

"Beautiful," I say.

"And cold," she replies.  "Come on, I'll show you where the bridge over the creek was, the one that washed out.  A boy I went to school with lived over there.  He was nice.  Then one night his mother came home and tried to kill him.  He was very quiet after that."

We find Lily and go back to the car and turn around and after a while we remember to look for Christopher's, but we disagree on exactly where it should be and wind up down at the beach instead, in time for the sunset.