About
Jasminne Morataya
Driving slowly, I look at my grandma from the corner of my eye. I am straining to make a connection, and remember her English degree from Immaculate Heart College. The dim lights in my head flicker and for the first time I think to ask her if she knew Sister Corita Kent, who taught there contemporaneously.
I ask my grandma if she has any stories about Corita. She saw the nun occasionally around campus, from a distance. The conversation ends there, and I feel buoyed in my ambient unstillness. I know something new, and feel connected. I am beaming from the steering wheel.
The Jetta never gets fixed. My dad gives her a white BMW 325i that was sitting in his garage and she resumes her own journeys around the neighborhood.
My grandparents met working as proofreaders, and claimed to have been tipped off on the true identity of the Zodiac Killer. They lived in Altadena for the entirety of their married lives, and in this house for nearly three decades. My grandfather died in 2016, and I moved into his old room after my college roommate situation fell apart. The home was built nearly one hundred years before in the English Cottage style, by a conman on a building spree.
I lived in Altadena for four years. It was a three-bedroom house on Marigold Street, and I found it easy to adjust to its weird rhythms: the termites eating away at the floorboards, the spirited colonies of mold sprouting between the shower grout and on the ceiling despite frequent cleaning, the earwigs, the spiders, and a revolving door of grumpy, semi-feral cats who free-fed on Friskies my grandmother poured out into paper bowls on the kitchen counter. The cats had different names depending on who you talked to.
Delilah was my favorite creature in the terrarium we called our house. She was a partially deaf, partially blind Jack Russell terrier who had been abandoned at my grandma’s several years before. Delilah had a single tooth left, and her tongue hung out of her mouth like an unfurled red carpet. She was firmly anchored to my grandma at all times, and howled fearfully by the door until she came back from her weekly errands.
The so-called ‘cat door’ was a giant hole sawed into the back door, covered by a castoff piece of rug which had turned grey with dirt, and cats were not the only travelers through this portal. Whenever I forgot my key, I could easily break in by sticking my arm up through that ragged, floor-level hole. Despite the mess, there was an oblique, grandma-logic and order to this place I’ve yet to find again anywhere else. I fit right in.
One of my domestic pastimes was wandering around the property, exploring and taking photos of the decaying, sintery rooms and the artifacts I discovered within. I came across matchbooks from bygone restaurants, ancient bottles of liquor or cleaning supplies, and a bathroom that was no longer functional–no water, no working outlets, no light nor windows. Behind the spiderwebbed vanity, my grandpa’s comb and aftershave seemed like relics in a pharaoh's tomb.
In the early 90’s, a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting lodged in the wall of the front room. Grandma called this the “drive-by room”, and it had become a floor-to-ceiling landfill of family junk: my dad’s plastic Millennium Falcon, memorial photo boards, fake flowers, a trunk full of handbags, a mini artificial Christmas tree, Halloween costumes. I unearthed my aunt’s life-size Madonna poster, which has had a prominent place in every home I’ve made for myself since.
Whenever I felt myself profoundly miserable in an unsatisfying social situation in the dark heart of Los Angeles, I knew that I could drive 30 minutes, into the comforting shadow of the mountainside, and be in my own completely private world. The coyotes would call out in the night, and everything else would fall away.
By the same token, throughout these four years, I often felt stuck and helpless. I was frequently driven down by an internal pressure to become more than what I was.
My grandmother was getting older and would someday need more help and supervision, but the graduate program I got into was only 10 months long, so I imagined I would be back to live there and work as a teacher in one of the nearby high schools.
Eventually, Delilah crossed over the ‘rainbow bridge’, and I no longer heard her long nails clacking around the house.
Emboldened by a fellowship, I left home in pursuit of these additional credentials up north, which in the end proved to be pretty arbitrary.
In the month before my move, I returned home after work and saw a chrysalis anchored to the gray curtain above my bed. A few mornings later, I woke up to the sound of flapping wings. It was a mourning cloak butterfly, and was reconstituted in its new form above my sleeping head.
Mourning cloaks are some of the first butterflies to emerge after winter, and this was another harbinger of spring.
I gently maneuvered the butterfly into a rice strainer with a piece of paper as all of the windows in my room were nailed shut. I opened the back door and watched it fly away crispily into whatever came next.
The last time I was home, it was January. I was visiting from graduate school. In the early morning, I woke up, burned some sage, and swept the floors of my room with strange, uncharacteristic delicacy. I made the bed so it would be ready for my following visit, and rolled up the Madonna poster so I could hang it up in my new apartment. In the hallway, I faltered. I vacillated between waking up my grandma to say goodbye, and being content to watch her sleep through the crack in the open door. I left without saying anything, creeping over the floorboards so as not to wake her.
A few days later, there was a calamitous windstorm, and my grandma’s car was totaled by a fallen tree. The hills turned from green to black. The room where I made the bed, the house that contained it, and the neighborhood were all gone in less than a 12-hour span, destroyed by the Eaton Fire.
My grandma evacuated with her pink purse, the shift dress she was wearing, and very little else. It felt very lucky, as most of the 19 people who died in our community were elderly. She tells my father, “Surely, the diamond in my wedding band didn’t burn.”
There’s no way to find a tiny diamond in a carcinogenic pile of ash, and bulldozers from The Army Corps of Engineers pull down what’s left of the house.
One year passes, and then my grandma is gone. The progression of her illness is insidiously fast, and in the difficulty of that month, I realize how much she meant to me.
I still drive up to Altadena, to the plot of land where the house was, and walk around slowly, picturing myself in the halls and rooms above the foundation. I think about my grandparents, about Delilah, about the other people who lived in the house and surrounding houses. Patches of wild sunflowers abound in these burned out lots, which stirs inner mumblings and Corita Kent-isms: "Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed."
I live in Northeast LA now. Some evenings, I wake up to the sound of coyotes, and for a few moments, I forget where I am.
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