The Hills are Alive
With sandwiches and flowers
I returned to California this week after a trip to the East Coast. It’s hard to beat New England in summertime—the beaches, the ice cream, the constant fear of contracting Lyme disease—but I had to get back to the boiling heat and no work that awaited me! As it turns out, traveling with an infant kind of sucks, so my sister drove us to the airport and then parked the car with the car seat near her house at the bottom of what she described as “the landslide hill.” She then left to go on a hiking trip in the Alps, leaving me to embark on a hiking trip through our neighborhood to retrieve my car.
The walk to my sister’s house involves walking up a huge hill, down a huge hill, then up another huge hill, which is physically challenging under normal circumstances and even more so with a baby strapped to your chest. Once we had scaled and descended the first hill, we arrived in the heart of Silver Lake, and I stopped to get a sandwich at Yummy.com.
Yummy.com is a grocery store and, presumably, a website. They are primarily a grocery delivery services, which means the shelves are sparsely populated with specialty foods that cost way more than they would at a normal grocery store. This doesn’t stop me from frequenting it in person, because for many years it was the closest grocery store within walking distance to my house until an even more expensive grocery store opened up nearby.
They also sell a vegetarian sandwich there that my sister told me a local food critic cited as a favorite. It’s the kind I remember from health food stores of my childhood: cucumber, cheese, peppers, greens, and sprouts loaded between two floppy slices of sandwich bread. It should probably cost five dollars but because it comes from Yummy.com it costs fifteen.
When I arrived, I ordered it from a tablet located directly to the side of the human being who would be making my sandwich, then had a conversation with her about how “the machines are taking over” and as she politely nodded along I could feel the molecules in my body completing their slow march toward fully becoming my parents.
She made the sandwich, I paid, then devoured it standing up at the tables directly outside of Yummy.com, because one thing I’ve learned about babies is they hate sitting, which is pretty rich for creatures that have no use of their legs or feet.
Sort of refreshed, I then began the walk up the next hill to my car, parked under the landslide hill. There’s a house on the way that has a beautiful garden that looks like one you’d find at an English cottage. The owner happened to be sitting on the porch, and I complimented his work, which then led him to give me a full tour of the front and back garden, identifying every single flower. It was his great aunt’s house and he had moved in a few years ago. He started gardening during the pandemic. We both remarked on that upside of that time—people planting gardens, which really benefit all of us. He said someone once told him the garden looks like one you’d find at an English cottage. I said that’s what I thought, too.
Before I left, he picked me a bouquet from all his flowers, stuffed inside a paper coffee cup from the coffee shop where everyone once worked on their screenplays and probably now works on influencing. He remarked on the fact that the coffees there are like seven dollars and I told him about my fifteen-dollar sandwich.
After thanking him, I continued my journey, holding the bouquet in front of me so it wouldn’t spill, sweating as I made my way up the last hill, reminding myself that the journey up eventually has a path down, but it will all take a little bit longer bearing the weight of a big little baby.
langan!! i had that same convo & subsequent feeling of becoming my parents with probably that same woman at yummy.com a month ago 💀
I loved the garden tour interlude you were provided.