mine.
*
The street was home, but, oh, these were kind streets, the
streets of children, real children. The houses were brick row
houses, all the same, two cement flights of stairs outside, the
outside steps, from the sidewalk. The lawns were hills sloping
down the height of one flight of steps, the lower one, to the
sidewalk. There was a landing between flights. Some of us had
patios: the big cement truck came, the huge tumbler turning
round and round, and the cement was poured out and flattened
down, and sticks marked the edges until it dried. Others had
some flowers: next door there were shabby roses, thorns. Each
house was the same, two floors, on the first floor a living
room, dining room, and tiny kitchen; up a tall flight of stairs
three bedrooms, two big, one tiny, a bathroom, a closet. The
stairs were the main thing: up and down on endless piggyback
rides on daddy’s back: up to bed with a piggyback ride, up
and down one more time, the greatest ride had a story to go
with it about riding horses or piggies going to market; up the
stairs on daddy’s back and then into bed for the rest of the
fabulous story; and I would try to get him to do it again and
again, up and down those stairs, and a story. Each house had
one family, all the houses were in a row, but two doors were
right next to each other above the cement steps so those were
the closest neighbors. The adults, mostly the women, would sit
on chairs up by their doors, or sit on the steps up by the doors
talking and visiting and watching the children, and the children
of all the houses would converge in the street to play. If you
looked at it you would see dismal brick row houses all the
same at the top of two flights of cement steps out in the wea
8
ther. But if you were a child, you would see that the adults
were far away, and that the street stretched into a million
secret hidden places. There were parked cars to hide behind
and under and telephone poles, the occasional tree, secret
valleys at the bottoms of lawns, and the mysterious interiors of
other people’s houses across the way. And then the backs of
the houses made the world bigger, more incredible yet. There
were garages back there, a black asphalt back alley and back
doors and places to hang clothes on a line and a million places
to hide, garbage cans, garages half open, telephone poles,
strange dark dirty places, basements. Two blocks behind us in
the back there was a convent, a huge walled-in place all verdant
with great trees that hid everything: and so our neighborhood
turned gothic and spooky and we talked of children captured
and hidden inside: and witches. Outside there were maybe
twenty of us, all different ages but all children, boys and girls,
and we played day after day and night after night, well past
