The Golden Women of Orange County

Editor's Note: Citric Acid couldn't be prouder of the thirteen Orange County contributors included in the landmark anthology Women in a Gold State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond. One of them, a Citric Acid stalwart, surveys and celebrates the collection. Read more of Mary Camarillo's work at https://marycamarillo.com/

I’ve been an Orange County woman since 1966 when I was fourteen and my father’s aerospace job transferred him to Santa Monica from Charlotte, North Carolina. The Beach Boys sang about “California Girls” on the radio as we drove across the country. I couldn’t wait to be one, but when we settled in Fountain Valley, California, I realized I didn’t quite fit the profile. I wasn’t blond, my skin never tanned, and I wasn’t allowed to wear a French bikini.

I’ve never felt like a true California girl, but almost sixty years later, California is still my home. And now, as “a woman of a certain age in youth-obsessed California,” I’m delighted to be included in a new anthology from Gunpowder Press, Women in a Golden State, California Poets at 60 and Beyond.

The anthology “invites readers to reconsider aging not as an end, but as an ongoing journey—one filled with beauty, strength, and boundless possibilities.” In celebration of the 175th anniversary of California’s statehood, the Gunpowder Press editors selected 175 contributors from across California, which allows a wide spectrum of territory and voices. Orange County is part of the mix, from Disneyland to Dana Point, from Fullerton to Balboa Island, and from the mouth of the Santa Ana River to the community swimming pools in Irvine.

I counted at least twelve other authors in the anthology who have lived or currently live in Orange County as I read through the biographies. There may be more. Not all authors include their hometowns in the bios, for a variety of reasons. Space is short and some folks don’t necessarily want to be pigeonholed by where they live, especially when it’s in Orange County.

I get that. I live in Huntington Beach.

Los Angeles Times reporter Gustavo Arellano has described Orange County as a “strange, bizarre, overachieving vortex of paradise,” and the works shared by the golden women of this county reflect this complexity. A strong sense of place percolates through these poems and essays, as do themes of loss and grief, the confines of life in suburbia, the confusion of being considered an outsider, and the challenges of making sense of it all.

There’s the constant contrast between beauty and danger. “Fire Drill (Santa Rosa, California 2017)” by Ellen Girardeau Kempler begins in peace:

At bedtime, no hint. Sky clear.

Moon rising

But when a terrifying fire starts, a retired couple is forced to::

...run

to the pool next door. Balance on the edge. Jump in.

Gasping air through soaked shirts, watching the world

burst into flame.

And they and the poet ask and answer:

How long does it take a house to burn down?

All night.

In her micro-essay, “Buoyant in the Surf Zone,” Lisa Black writes of "Bees buzzing red bottlebrushes next to poisonous oleander. The tasty tang of hose water. Lungs stinging with smog-itis on deep breaths."

There is sorrow and despair. "Now everything’s / a housing tract," Robbi Nester writes in her poem “California.”

eucalyptus and lemon groves

chopped down long ago to build condos

in pre-approved shades of grey or blue.

No more life in the tidepools.

Valentina Gnup remembers driving the streets of California after her divorce in “My Life Flashes Before Me at Edward Hopper’s Painting, Gas, 1940.” She writes,

...Crying every time

my daughter’s weren’t watching, I smell eucalyptus leaves, perfume

of my youth. Santa Anas, orange groves, my dad putting the top down.

Lisa Alvarez describes, in her essay “Farther Along,” hiking down the Santa Ana River in the San Bernardino Mountains and witnessing the haunting aftermath of a late summer storm: "The raging water took down mature cedars, pines, and oaks, striping them of branches and bark, leaving them tumbled and tangled in vast stacks. I won’t live long enough to see trees return to the river’s once heavily forested banks."  

There’s the ever-present disconnect of not belonging. In my essay, “Flip Flop,” I explored my family’s bewilderment at what we encountered in Fountain Valley as new arrivals: "Although my mother finally learned to let avocados ripen

before serving, my father insisted on eating tacos with a fork..."

Marie Connors’ poem “Association Pool” captures two young women observing another woman swimming in

this suburban place that calls itself

a city, a private park in a planned

development where the grass stays

green...

And where

...To be known as a lesbian

makes one of us tremble, the other

breathes so quietly she could be dead.

Debby Arrin admits to an unidentified Laguna Beach resident that she knows she doesn’t belong in Laguna in her essay, “Notes From An Outsider.” But Arrin argues, "Who wouldn’t want to just open a window for an ocean breeze and gaze at the simmering blue sea? Who wouldn’t want to take an after-work dive in the waves, without driving the God-awful 55 freeway for hours?"

Who wouldn’t indeed? In addition to freeway horrors, there are other evils. In her poem “Balboa,” Wendy Watson remembers gathering urchins, starfish and mussels, and laying them on the roof of a rented house on Crystal Avenue:

Our dwelling was a tiny rented house on Crystal Avenue, the beds of

four dreaming children gathered closed. On Sundays our parents slept

late. My sister took her younger charges out early in the morn when

light spreads across the easy water.

We gathered urchins and starfish, mussels, our prizes dragged home

on the bristles of a worn-out broom. They were laid on the roof to dry.

Apart from the stench was the cruelty.

There’s cheeky humor. In the poem “Mary Magdalene and the Decline of the California Incline” by Ruthie Marlenée, Mary Magadalene ditches her cubicle, heeds "the Pacific sirens,” and heads out to find Jesus carrying:

...a bottle of green Gatorade

and a weathered cardboard sign. Halo encircling

his sun-bleached plaits

Jesus cautions,

"....It’s the end of the dream

old gal, don’t quit your day job."

Kathleen Gunton writes about how the aging mind begins to change words in her poem, “This Is About Change And Soy Sauce.” Gunton explains:

my children know I know

their names and allow

interchange like asking

Joe about Rob’s beard

Jan Hanson asserts in “Straw Hat” that she is:

not the hunched-over, slow-walking

woman reflected in the Smart & Final window---

Instead, she’s still the:

18-year-old in a yellow sundress

wearing Straw Hat cologne, breezing

through Disneyland on my day off to pick up

my paycheck at the food stand where I work

And hoping to see:

the tall guy from the Matterhorn ride—

tan legs, knees visible between lederhosen and

long Bavarian socks.

Finally, Penelope Moffet finds music in her neighborhood in her poem, “In the Labyrinth.” Moffet transforms the cat outside into a violin, while...

Leaf-blowers on the street below

are saxophones and flutes, that

hammer in the distance is a drum.

High-pitched electronic chirps

of autos waking up

are xylophones.

Moffet insists:

...Here

you live too much indoors

but even in this labyrinth

there’s song.

Song indeed, in this extraordinary anthology. Even (and especially) in Orange County.

Mary Camarillo’s first novel The Lockhart Women, published in June 2021 by She Writes Press, won first place in the Next Generation Indie Awards for first fiction. Her work has appeared in publications such as 166 Palms, The Sonora Review, Lunch Ticket, and The Ear. Her newest novel, Those People Behind Us, is out out from She Writes Press. She lives in Huntington Beach, California and contributes frequently to Citric Acid.