Glenn Ranch Road

Posted on October 17, 2002 in Neighborhood

I saw a stout woman, wearing a grey sweatshirt, pushing a shopping cart full of groceries with one hand and the yellow-topped red plastic car that bore her son with the other. She passed a spot where there were no houses: just sycamore crowded bottomland and stark, scalped slopes leading to an industrial park. The condo-crenellated crest of Portola Hills lay a mile away, all uphill.

When I came back that way about an hour and a half later, I saw the empty shopping cart pushed up against a yellow fire hydrant, nearer the bottom of the hill than where I had seen the woman and her boy.