Pictured above: Kimberly Crest. The koi pond and gardens at Kimberly Crest where I use to read after school. Kimberly Crest is a French château-style Victorian mansion built in 1897 featured on the PBS series “America’s Castles.” It is a beautiful mansion set high on a hill overlooking the whole valley.
For quite some time, things were not easy because her family often moved. Sometimes it seemed exciting moving to a new place and seeing new things but sometimes it was hard to start over at a new school and make new friends. A few years later, her father died and she felt even more rootless and prayed harder for a brother or sister.
Pictured left: Morey Mansion. This Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion built in 1882, the Morey Mansion on Terracina, was on the way home from school. This Victorian jewel was featured in “America’s Favorite Victorian.”
When she was a teenager, her mother remarried and had a son. The girl was so excited because she finally had a baby brother to share her days with. Unfortunately, he was too young and she was too old for either one of them to have much to say to one another so she had to wait for him to get a little older.
Pictured above: My biking trail through the old orange groves. At the turn of the 1900s, Redlands was a vacation destination for wealthy Angelenos. Called the "Palm Springs" of the next century, roses were planted along city thoroughfares. Today, locals preserve the tree-lined streets, beautiful historic buildings, Victorian style homes and the locally-owned shops and boutiques in the charming downtown district.
In the meantime, the girl wasn't thinking so much about her past but more about the future. She knew she wanted to go to college but she didn't know what she wanted to be. Instead of being sad because she didn't have many friends at another new school, she would go to the library for lunch and read about all the men and women who made a difference in history. In those books, she would not only share their adventures and try to learn from their mistakes but imagine a future for herself beyond the tiny world she had known.
Pictured above: A concert at the Bowl. The Bowl was built in 1930 and is home of the oldest 'free' outdoor concert series in the U.S.
She would read under the stars at the Bowl, beside the koi pond at Kimberly Crest, at the top of the Smiley Heights botanical gardens, on a grassy knoll along the winding road of the old orange groves. There she would be transported through the mythology of pagan days, the heroic tales of the ancient Greeks in the Iliad or the Romans in the Aeneid, the wild Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons who made early Britain with the poetic Celts, Charlesmagne's dream and the kings and queens of Europe, the first Americans and why they wrote the Federalist papers declaring their right to freedom, the tragedy of the Dust Bowl and Arthur Miller's question to the American Dream. All these books set her imagination on fire the way some girls feel after a first kiss.
Pictured left: Post Office. Originally part of the territory of the Morongo and Aguas Calientes tribes, the area was settled by Spanish settlers in the 1770s where Franciscan padres established the Assistencia mission. In 1842, the Lugo family received a large land grant creating the first fixed civilization in the area. In 1851, the area received its first Anglo inhabitants. In the 1880s, the arrival of the railroads touched off a land boom and with the area's hot, dry climate and ready access to water supplies, it was seen as an ideal center for citrus production. As the area grew, they named the city “Redlands” after the color of the adobe soil.It would take her a long time to realize she was a writer. It would take her longer to find out all those stories she read about as a girl, her family played a part in those events and those worlds weren't quite as distant as she thought.
Pictured above: A postcard from the botanical gardens at Smiley Heights.
Because, as if by magic, two things happened!
Pictured above: A.K. Smiley Public Library. The library that held some of my favorite books. It is a Moorish-style library built in 1898. Behind the Smiley Library is the Lincoln Shrine, the only memorial honoring the "Great Emancipator", the sixteenth president, west of the Mississippi River.
First, she received a mysterious letter that her father had a son before she was born and her brother wanted to meet her!
Second, she would take a trip to Paris and find a portrait, quite by accident, of one of her ancestors.
This letter and the portrait would set her on a remarkable journey, my dear nephews, that is also part of your story.
See you next time...
xx
