It’s All Good in My ‘Hood

The Blah Blah Family has had our fair share of crappy luck with housing. Since 2006, we have rented three houses in the Los Angeles area, and in every single case the owner has had to move back into the house due to a change in personal circumstances. This is our third house and our favorite so far, and again, we have to move.

I will miss the house itself, as we have lived here for almost two years and that is most of Ceeya’s life, so a lot of great memories were made inside these walls. The house is a good size for us—actually, a little big for us, which means more house to clean, and obviously I don’t love that aspect of it. The yard is ginormous. When people visit us they can’t get over it, and I love that aspect of the property too. But what I will miss most about it is the neighborhood it’s in.

I want to say the house is on a cul-de-sac, but in actuality it sits right at the middle part of a crescent-shaped street. You turn off of a main road, follow the street around in a loop and it takes you right back out to the main road. The local elementary school is right down the street, so we walk Viva to school. The park and recreation center is next to the school, and Viva goes to an after-school program and summer camp there, and has also played in their T-ball and Little Jammers basketball leagues. Last weekend our local Councilmember sponsored a Movies in the Park night, and I took the girls over while Sweet Dub was out working on a freelance gig. We spread out a blanket on the baseball diamond near some friends, and when Ceeya got sleepy, I had no qualms about taking her home and leaving Viva “alone” to continue to watch the movie. Another friend said she’d just drop her off at home when the movie ended. As it turned out, Sweet Dub got home twenty minutes later and just walked over to get her, but he didn’t have to.

Given our proximity to the park, and Viva’s involvement in sports, we’ve gotten to know a lot of our neighbors. People are friendly. It’s also a racially mixed neighborhood, which (with the range of skin tones in my family) makes me feel comfortable. When you go to the supermarket, there’s a mixture of black, Asian, white, Hispanic—all of which I naively expected to find in every neighborhood when I moved to LA (hey, they said it was one of the most diverse cities in the world). I would classify it as a solidly middle-class neighborhood if I had to throw a label on it.

I like when I am walking down the street either to or from the school in the morning and people honk and wave, or I stop to talk to my neighbor and his 3-year-old as they head off to preschool and work. I like that I run into people I know—friends from Viva’s old preschool, her 2nd grade teacher, the mom of a classmate—at Target, at the mall, at the market, and we stop to have a friendly chat. I love that my neighborhood is welcoming and pleasant to move about in. I love that it’s clean and has nice big trees and people walking their dogs and kids riding their scooters to the park.

Lately I have become really nostalgic about having to move and leave our little corner of the universe. We lucked into finding this house. It is really hard to find a rental in this area. We’ve looked at a couple of options in a three-mile radius but the places have been really run-down, or too small, or too big.

Sigh. The perfect place will manifest, right? I’m trying to be all about the power of positive thinking and focus on all the things I love about this situation so I can be clear about what I’m looking for. But I think I’m just trying to replicate this house and this block. Maybe that means we’ll find something even better?