A picture of pre-annexation Santa Ana Heights

When I’m idling in the front yard on a fine spring day checking out

my Santa Ana Heights neighborhood and saying hello to the ducks

visiting next door, it amuses me to project this scene onto the image

of Newport Beach, to whom we will officially be conjoined next July,

and muse about what will change.

For example, the recent horse manure caper probably won’t be

possible in Newport Beach.

As we are finding out in distant lands these days, there is a

price paid for freedom, and one of the prices we pay for our

iconoclasm in Santa Ana Heights is horse manure. Apparently, there

are no rules about this proclivity of horses, no one trailing behind

with pooper-scoopers. So when a load was dropped in the street just

off the end of my driveway last week, it wasn’t the first time. But

this one took some unusual directions.

Our French friends, Howard and Francoise Appel, were our house

guests at the time, and Howard -- who raises much of his own

vegetables in Provence -- regarded the manure as a golden find, a

direct line to revitalizing our growing things. This is a loop I

steadfastly avoid, but my wife -- as I discovered later -- gratefully

accepted the bag of manure Howard gathered and distributed it in her

flower beds.

Two days later, our not-very-discriminating dachshund, Coco, got

quite sick, dragging about with her tail between her legs and

refusing to eat. After several days of this and a $300 veterinarian

bill, I saw Coco pick up something from the flower bed and carry it

behind the garage.

Since then, there has been a running contest to find and remove

all of the horse manure from the flower beds before Coco beats us

there and runs up another hospital bill.

Somehow, I can’t see that drama playing out in Newport Beach. They

would surely pass a law against it.

Same thing with the ducks. They come visiting regularly from the

place we have known warmly for two decades as the “duck farm,” a

block down the street and overlooking the Back Bay. For two

generations of children in our family and scores of visiting kids,

the duck farm has been a mandatory stop and -- no matter how many

times revisited -- a certain delight.

Besides a variety of ducks, there are also geese and chickens that

poke through the rail fence to commune with visitors, especially

small ones. The duck farm is at the high end of a half-dozen estates

along the bluffs that define Santa Ana Heights. The wildlife, which

includes a passel of rabbits, wander about an expansive green parade

ground with a view of the Back Bay that real estate salesmen would

salivate over. There are no gates here, just an open driveway with a

well-worn house settled comfortably at the end amid a general feeling

of congenial disarray.

The owner of this spread was as open and generous and earthy as

the spread itself. Her name was Pat Cox, and she died last week at

the age of 81. She stopped a couple of times in her car when I was

hanging out in my front yard to tell me she liked something I had

written. It is one of my great regrets that I didn’t know her better.

One of my neighbors who knew her very well indeed was Treb

Heining, the balloon man, who would frequently stop and visit with

her when he was walking his dog in the Back Bay.

“I never knew what I would find when I stopped,” he said, “but she

was always interesting. It was a high spot in my day when I could sit

and have a glass of wine with Pat.”

The activities listed in her obituary were downright exhausting to

read. She graduated from Stanford, served as a lieutenant in the Navy

in World War II, and was a ranked tennis player and a 3-handicap

golfer. She fought off various forms of cancer for three decades, and

she and her husband raised two children before she was widowed.

Meanwhile, she gave generously of herself to every local

environmental cause, raised funds for half a dozen public service

organizations and groups, and was honored by Planned Parenthood for

her work in its behalf -- among many other acts of giving.

Not the least was the joy she gave the hundreds of children who

communed with her ducks and geese and chickens, learning tolerance,

among other virtues, from the likes of “Chuck the Duck,” who fancied

himself a chicken and hung out determinedly with them, despite

entreaties from fellow ducks.

Pat Cox was a low profile connective between the horses who walk

our streets and the ducks who gabble on our lawns -- yes, and the

dogs who bark at them for the required amount of protest time, too.

Heining called her “the drumbeat of this eclectic neighborhood,”

and the description couldn’t be more apt.

The greatest gift Cox gave her neighbors was the way she lived,

expressing the free-wheeling, nonjudgmental and feisty sensibilities

of Santa Ana Heights. It is our great loss that she won’t be around

to make sure that those sensibilities will carry on despite a name

change.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.