The house adjacent to our back fence (and pictured above) was a stately old matron, the very first in our entire neighborhood, or so we have heard. I used to admire it from the street on my walks when we lived several blocks away. Its deep frontage sported the year-round, unirrigated green lawn common to this part of the world and its more or less 12-month rains that seemed another world altogether for this California-reared boy, used to that state’s annual May through September drought cycle. The home played host to a family for the first couple of years after…