Harden Gatehouse - Portuguese Point (Private Property), 17 January 2010 The author Joan Didion lived in Palos Verdes in the '60s... for a month, and I believe it was at this gate house. She evokes images of the place in her memoir of loss (both her husband and their daughter died within a year of each other), The Year of Magical Thinking: "… One day I would notice a familiar stretch of coastal highway in a television commercial and realize it was the gate house, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula at Portuguese Bend, to which John and I had brought Quintana home from St. John’s Hospital.… Neither the house nor its gate could be seen in the commercial but I experienced a sudden rush of memories: getting out of the car on that highway to open the gate so that John could drive through; watching the tide come in and float a car that was sitting on our beach to be shot for a commercial; sterilizing bottles for Quintana’s formula while the gamecock that lived on the property followed me companionably from window to window. …"
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White-Crowned Sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii - 30 January 2010
This little guy sat on the fence surrounding the pool for a long time, letting me snap away. While I guessed him to be a sparrow, I learned further from the Golden Guide: Birds of North America that his kind is "abundant in West, in thickets, hedgerows, or wood margins adjacent to fields or open areas...Song is of clear whistles and buzzy trills." I also learned that lore is "the space between the eye and the bill of a bird" and that this particular sparrow has no color at the lore, as opposed to other crowned sparrows.
