25. Jeffersonian Door

I have a Jeffersonian window. I don't know how it got its name. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson liked them. Maybe they were at Monticello. I don't know. A quick google search is futile. The only sites I can find are other St. Louis architecture blogs. Perhaps it's a colloquialism.

What is a Jeffersonian window? When closed, it looks like any other window in the room. It has a top pane and bottom, a lock in the center where they meet, and a handle that looks as if it would raise the lower pane up. Just like any double-hung window. But when you pull the handle up, you realize the window raises from the floor. The paneling below the window isn't attached the wall, but in the track with the lower pane of glass.

So you raise this up into the ceiling--the bottom of the window goes up at least to the level of the lock where the two window panes meet. It may be (mine is old, obviously, and I don't push and pry) that at that point both parts can continue up further into the wall, but my upper pane doesn't budge. So you have to duck a bit to walk through the doorway it makes, but you can walk through.

Mine opens onto a sleeping porch off my bedroom. We don't use it often because the cats can jump from the porch to the neighbor's kitchen window (we live next to a 2-family flat with an apartment on the second floor). Since I've played that game once with Hickory already, I'm not about to let them sun on the porch until I get it screened in. Which I will do--it's just a matter of priorities.

But that door is the reason we will never do a two-story addition to the back of our house. We might one day expand the kitchen and dining room. We might one day then expand the sleeping porch onto the addition's roof and make a deck. But I won't part with the door. My house has few intricacies of this sort. It is the Plain Jane on a block of Fancy Nancies. I won't take her Jeffersonian window away.

24. Authentic Rehab

This past week at coffee, Ann mentioned that she and her husband were talking that morning about authenticity. What makes something authentic? They were talking about vacation spots and natural wonders and so forth--her husband is an architect whose focus is on such destinations. So we talked a bit about it for a moment, giving examples of what is and is not authentic. In the end, we couldn't define authentic, "but I know it when I see it."

"This coffee house," she pointed around us. "This is authentic."

As opposed to, say, a Starbucks, she went on, which is prefabricated. I knew what she meant.

I've been looking at houses with my sister Bevin lately, and some of them are authentic and some are not. Sometime we'll walk into a house and have the strange feeling that something isn't right. I don't mean some sort of sixth sense about the house or its former inhabitants (although I admit sometimes that happens, too). I'm talking about rehab projects.

There seem to be three types of rehabbers in south St. Louis (and perhaps nationwide or worldwide in cities of every age and type). First, those who strip the house of all its authenticity--in St. Louis, that means the woodwork, the plaster walls, mantels, doors, plumbing fixtures, kitchen cabinets, and so forth--and replace it with something out of a display home in the county. Baseboards shrink from 10 inches to 2. The bathrooms lose the clawfoot tub and gain a walk in shower. The floors are carpeted in berber or worse. Peel and stick vinyl in the kitchen with plain light wood cabinetry. Sometimes they go over the top with granite counters and gorgeous stone floors, but it still feels wrong. Bevin and I walk in, sometimes ooh and ah over bits of it (like the California closets, I mean, I could go with some inauthentic details in my closets), but always walk out with a shrug. Not the same thing at all.

Then there are the remuddlers. We've seen some doozies. Indoor-outdoor carpeting in the kitchen. Or bathroom. Refrigerators in the pantry. Faux fireplaces with 1970s-era looking faux-brick surrounds. Plastic tile on the walls. Closets of all sorts built in the wrong places. Windows you can see from outside but not from the inside--they've been covered up with drywall. Beams half-supported on jacks. Cheap vinyl windows. Gas lines that cut through ductwork. Two family conversions to single family homes that are simply a hole knocked in the wall--the old kitchen upstairs is a bedroom. With a kitchen sink and cabinets above a bed. Toilets in glass-brick walled bathrooms in the basement. I could go on. They are maybe authentic, in that they are authentic crap, but they are still crap.

Sometimes, though, we find a house that has been lovingly restored to its original magnificence (or better in some cases). Built in cabinetry around an arts and crafts mantel. Original wood floors in the kitchen. Clawfoot tubs with re-finished feet. Woodwork in dark colors, ceiling beams in the dining room, windows that are wood at least on the inside.

This last group, of course, is always outside Bevin's price range.

You pay for what you get.

Luckily, we have seen some relatively untouched places, maybe with a few mistakes, but not too much to undo or wish wasn't gone. The kitchen might be a Home Depot special, but the woodwork in the living room is intact. The floors are wide pine, like mine, in bad shape but with that authentic patina of a hundred years of feet walking across them. These are my goal when I look at houses with her. Find one with a new electric service, copper pipes, and an HVAC system younger than the Reagan administration. And then pounce on the dang thing before somebody ruins it.

That's how I feel about my house. Every time I lift off one more layer of Mary Chapman, I feel the house breathe a sigh of relief. Better now.

23a. Sylvan Springs Photos

23. Sylvan Springs Park

Our school picnic every year was a carnival. We had a parade from the parking lot down the road past the national cemetery and into the little county park. Carnival rides, picnics, and exhaustion awaited us. I remember, as a girl scout, being a color guard at the front of the parade in 5th grade. I carried the flag and got to hand it off to Nikki about halfway. We had to practice the handoffs without stopping the parade.

We set up in the main loop, families spreading blankets and grabbing up picnic tables. The Tilt-A-Whirl and Scrambler and all those take apart put together deliver on a truck rides were back a bit further. We had ride bracelets, of course, color coded string attached to our wrists with a metal clasp of the same color. Craig always thought he could counterfeit them and sell them on the side, but he never did.

We rode the rides and had lunch with the families and I don't think anyone ever got a sunburn because of the huge pin oak trees shading the whole place. The first two years, that was the extent of it, but in fifth grade, having changed out of the girl scout uniform and into more standard kid attire, having ridden the rides more times than I could count with Jenny Jennifer Misdy Nikki Christy, I walked away from the carnival with Misdy and over a little hill.

Misdy lived right behind the park, so it wasn't a surprise for her, but it was like discovering a mysterious little world. Over the hill was a bridge, a stone bridge, and beyond that, steps down into a stone courtyard. I stood at the top of them, taking this sharp little breath and staring at the courtyard. A spring ran through it, with tiny stone bridges and little alcoves and a spout in the wall on one end where the spring came out. Misdy knew about this place and it of course became a place of legend and fantasy. It was perfect for play about elves or fairies, and even at 10 I wasn't too old for that sort of thing. We went back to the carnival, but the next time I went over to her house, we spent the whole time in the courtyard.

I moved after fifth grade and didn't look back. Visits to St. Louis involved tourist destinations like the zoo and downtown hotels, not little county parks with mysterious stone courtyards hidden in the hills. I forgot all about it until I came up for a college visit with my high school boyfriend. I drove him down to Sylvan Springs Park and showed it to him, in the dark, on the way back to my grandmother's house after a trip to Ted Drewes (of course). We stood there in the stone courtyard, the spring no longer active, warning signs on the trees to keep us from drinking the poisonous sulfur laden water. Graffiti on the stones. The place in disrepair. But I'll hand it to him. He saw what I saw.

On the way back to the car he said simply, "if you come up to school here, be careful."

I took Mike by the park once, to see that the little courtyard had been partially restored. It was a World War II era biergarten for the troops stationed briefly at Jefferson Barracks (which my old grade school practically sat in--we could watch national guard troops do their thing while we were at recess). It was a place for parties, and a private group had restored it after a different generation of teenagers had used it for their own parties.

We took Sophia when she turned 4--I took pictures of her there in the biergarten. I could see on her face the same sort of wonder I must have displayed the first time I saw it. I guess I need to bring Maeve over this autumn. It's nice to be able to share something like that with them after all these years.

22. Ted Drewes - Grand

"The Chippewa location is the original," Carlos would always insist my freshman year. Then I'd argue with him, because I knew better. Grand was first (in reality, it wasn't, but of the two that still exist, it is older). He'd giggle and I'd get infuriated over nothing and we'd change the subject, again and again.

My dad would come home late after an evening shift, or maybe it's an amalgamated memory of many late nights for different reasons. I had on footie pajamas and a kiddie concrete, strawberry or pineapple, always, sitting in the red van while he had hot fudge and my mother had butterscotch. Hot fudge and butterscotch took on gender, it was so solidly connected in my mind to the flavor of concretes at Ted Drewes.

When I announced I'd be going to Saint Louis University, my anatomy teacher, Mr. Termuhlen, was excited--that's where he went, that's where he met his wife. He had something for me to promise. I needed to find someone from Ohio, somebody in my dorm, which was his wife's dorm, of course, and take them to Ted Drewes. I didn't--I never fell in with any Ohioans, but I took other people there. And people took me there. History repeated itself, right, with my meeting Mike at SLU and getting married...but now I live in St. Louis and there's no romantic notions to pass on to anyone.

The whole last month of pregnancy, all I wanted was a Dutchman sundae (pronounced sun-duh, of course) and it was the one time of year the Chippewa location was closed. Grand is only open in the summer, but Chippewa stays open except for the dead of winter. I had to survive on Dairy Queen, which is like asking for a glass of red wine and being handed Boone's Farm.

Every summer, at some point, I turn to Mike and say "TD?" just like my parents used to. Code so the kids don't know, in case he vetoes. He never vetoes. We plop the kids in the car, in their pajamas and nightgowns, and drive down Grand, just to where it bends at Meramec Street. The bright yellow lights (mosquito prevention? I just don't know), the little blue neon sign, the completely unnecessary sandwich board on the sidewalk. Everybody sitting on the tailgates and trunks. My daughters are partial to mint sundaes, which sounds about as appetizing as a toothpaste shake, but they adore the thick green glue atop a scoop of custard. I usually succumb to the Dutchman, all that sticky goodness of chocolate and caramel and pecan. Mike has the strawberry shortcake.

Tonight, though, it was marshmallow chip. For a change.

21. Vess

Most grocery stores have their off-brand "private brand" soda. Most of them are pretty bad knock offs of the originals. I remember when I worked at Wal*Mart down in Houston, Sam's Cola and its cousins were a quarter a can in the coke machines outside the store--which kept the prices down on the brand name sodas but never tempted me enough to drink them. Actually, I did--I drank the lemon lime whatever it was. But most knock offs just aren't quite right.

I grew up with Vess and I didn't realize it was one of those kinds of brands, sort of a second-tier soda, until I didn't live here and couldn't find it in the stores. As a family, we didn't buy soda when I was little, but anytime we went up to Jack & Joe's house (my dad's aunt Jackie and her husband Joe), I drank Vess strawberry soda. They had a fridge in the basement that was all soda and beer: Vess was the soda, and Pabst was the beer.

Later I grew to love "Just Whistle" which was Vess' orange soda. I didn't realize cream soda was a brownish clear liquid in some parts of the country until I was in college; I thought it was supposed to be an artificial red color like Vess' version (I think this is a northern-southern distinction, actually, as I remember cream soda down in Georgia was red, too).

I don't drink a lot of soda anymore--probably have had two sodas this year. I drink a lot of coffee these days and I try not to ingest too much sugar. But sometimes I think about playing Life or Monopoly down in Jackie and Joe's basement with my cousin and my brother, at that old table that had been my great-grandmother's. I think about that sharp carbonated taste with the ultra-sweet fake strawberry or grape flavor, and I miss it.

20. Water

St. Louis has the best drinking water in the nation. It's true. It's been decided by a panel of water tasting judges. Wouldn't that be an interesting job?

I've known this my whole life.

Our water is clear, for one thing. It comes out of the tap without sediment or color. Ice cubes melt in your glass and there's no extra stuff at the bottom that got pulled out when the water froze. I have lived in places where water was slightly brown or pink or cloudy. Sometimes very cloudy. Sometimes "better make tea before you drink it" kind of sediment problems. Nasty stuff, after living here.

Our water is also taste-free. It does not taste like a chlorinated pool (like my inlaws' water); it doesn't taste metallic, salty, muddy, stale, or swampy. There's no taste at all. Perfect for all purposes, frankly--it makes great coffee and tea, for instance. It's like licking the condensation off a glass of an ice cold beverage of your choice. It tastes like wet.

Our water is cold, too, with pipes far enough below ground to keep from freezing.

We have a lot of it. Enough that I don't have a water meter--I pay a flat rate for water, no matter how much I use. All the old houses in the city are this way. Those two big rivers, you know.

I love St. Louis water. Enough that when I travel, I have a hard time staying hydrated, because every other tap water I've tasted? Gross.

19. Heat and Humidity

It's not the heat...

It isn't. Having lived in southern California, I must honestly admit that the humidity makes everything worse.

Today, and this weekend, we are in for a rare treat: a July three day weekend with high temperatures in the mid-70s and low humidity.

It's like an unseasonably warm early October day. Crisp, even.

This is why I like St. Louis summers. Yes, we had a 10 day stretch in June that made me wonder if I was living in Houston, but now this.

It's been a great time for the air conditioning to go out--the past week has been nice and mild. But we might break some records this weekend, I hear.

Hope so.

18. Sleeping Porch

When I was very young, we lived on South Grand. We lived in a four-family flat building, with four little shotgun style apartments and a center staircase in the front and one in the back. It was a two-bedroom apartment, with a closed in porch off the back bedroom (my bedroom at the time).

When my college roommate moved to Magnolia St., to a two-family flat, they also had a closed in porch off the small back bedroom. And when Mike signed the lease on his first (and later my first) apartment, it was a tiny 1 bedroom, three room shotgun in a four-family building, but it also had that closed in porch.

And I remember thinking, "what, is this some sort of weird 1910 excuse for a three-season room? Some sort of bonus space?" Why on earth would you build a porch off the back bedroom and then close it in with the same windows the rest of the apartment had? It wasn't added on later, and it wasn't closed in later. Windows all around, 8 total--well, 9, really, because the back bedroom it sat against had a window out onto the porch, too.

My great-aunt Sarah explained it to me, finally, the year I lived with her. St. Louis has had miserable summers as long as she can remember (and even though she'd be scandalized to read this in print, she is 92 years old). Those unheated, uninsulated rooms on the backs of the brick houses were sleeping porches. In the heat of the summer, they were the first defense against the sleepless humid nights in the city.

Of course, when the porches themselves got too hot, folks slept in the park. In the park.

I thought about this phenomenon when our air conditioning went out this week. We were in the middle of a strong summer heat wave and the temperature inside of our house started really creeping up. We have a second story porch, but it isn't blocked in or even screened. It has a regular railing and a teensy bit of a slope towards the outside edge. I don't think I'd sleep there at this point.

We made it through the two days without a problem, using a spare room AC unit we usually have up in the attic. But it reminded me that I want that porch in working order sometime soon. It's been three years of talking about it. Right about on schedule, Wissinger-wise.

17. Ash Pit

When I was little my grandfather used to call me Snicklefritz and jokingly threaten that he was going to throw me in the ash pit.

All city houses had alley ash pits. I can see where mine was and where the one across the alley probably was. But they are no more--and the houses with garages don't even have the foundation left.

But in some places they have ash pits still in amazingly good condition, some of them molded from concrete like this one. And they were ash pits--a place to put ashes from the fire place, the coal furnace, and also, of course, for trash.

Nowadays our fireplaces aren't used (or are converted to gas); the furnaces are on the natural gas line; trash goes in the dumpsters. I am fond of dumpsters overall, having lived in places with roll out carts or bags by the front curb. I like having things hide in the alleys.

But I like that our houses are old enough to have the vestiges of this kind.

16. Provel

No, I have not misspelled something.

Provel is cheese. Sort of. It's like American cheese--a pasteurized processed cheese. Not real cheese.

Provel is a St. Louis cheese. I have never yet seen it elsewhere--except perhaps in the satellite cities of Cape Girardeau or Columbia Missouri, that sort of place, where St. Louisans go to college or wind up after they go to college. I never saw it in Georgia or Texas or anywhere else I've spent time in a grocery store.

Provel goes on pizza. For those of you who don't know what "St. Louis style pizza" is, I'll explain. St. Louis style, just as someone who eats it on occasion, not as some sort of expert, is a round cracker crust pizza cut into squares, or sometimes into the traditional pie wedges. I like thin crust, crispy cracker crust with lots of toppings and low on the sauce. I have had wonderful St. Louis style pizza down at Pizza A-Go-Go, where Frank will play the little organ in the corner to entertain diners on a slow night. I've had decent St. Louis style other places...most of these places do not use provel (or give you the choice). Provel on a pizza must be piping hot right out of the oven to be palatable, but some places can make it decently.

Others (especially chain restaurants) do not. They are not ok. The pizzas have a weird sheen to them. Provel cheese was invented to replace mozzarella on pizzas--an easy to melt (and probably cheap) cheese that doesn't string when you bite into it. Provel doesn't do that, after all. It breaks apart easily in a bite. But then it sticks to the back of your teeth and roof of your mouth. You have to coat a pizza in more toppings than its little cracker crust can hold to hide the provel.

Provel makes my friend Mary sick when she eats it; when we go to St. Louis pizza places, we always request mozzarella instead of provel--many places will substitute for you.

For a long time, I thought provel was just a shortened form of the word provelone, which is a fine cheese in its own right. But no--provel is a combination of provelone, cheddar, and swiss all stuck together.

St. Louis has an Italian section in town called The Hill, and some places are fabulous little sandwich shops and grocery stores. Others are restaurants that specialize in Northern Italian cuisine. Plus a hard to swallow sweet red sauce and this weird, weird cheese.

It is best avoided.

15. Free Museums

It's a midwestern thing, I heard on NPR a couple days ago. Free art museums. Wouldn't it be wonderful, the man being interviewed was saying, to go to an art museum for just an hour or so. Go, see something, and leave to contemplate it.

But of course.

St. Louis has a free art museum--a good one. It's not as big as some, but St. Louis isn't as big as some. We have all the standards--a Water Lilies, medieval art, more Max Beckmann than we deserve, ancient stuff from China and Meso-America. Art museum stuff. And I can walk in with a baby in a stroller, take my 7 year old to look at the mummy in the basement, and then walk out without feeling like I have to get my money's worth. I already have.

The parking is free, too--as it is that the free History Museum in the same park. The zoo is free, although you either pay to park or hunt down a spot on the street. We can (and do) go to the zoo and only see a third of it. Then we go have lunch and aren't so totally exhausted that everyone breaks down and cries on the way home. The Science Center is free, although we don't go there as often. Probably only two or three times since Sophia came along. Mike used to work there; once you know the inner workings of a thing (law, sausage, the Science Center) it isn't as enjoyable.

I love free cultural institutions. It makes me not begrudge the fee for the zoo train. Or getting something for my toddler to eat while we're there. It means that we go to these places, instead of just talking about going to these places.

But the other thing it does, the negative thing it does, is it makes my teeth fall out of my mouth when we go to Chicago or Houston or San Francisco or wherever we're visiting. And it's not free. What do you mean it's $7 to park and $10 for children under 8? What the hell is that all about? Do we really need to go there? Isn't there a park with a playground instead? But we go, at least to some of the places--I don't go to zoos elsewhere, but I will visit other art museums. Children's museums make me insane, but I like the one in Houston well enough. And I like specific museums, like ones dedicated to baseball or dogs or steamships.

There's something to be said for my tax money supporting cultural institutions, so that the art museum can live up to its tag line: dedicated to art and free to all.

14. Graffiti

Graffiti (from the Italian, for scribbling) occurs in two different categories here on the south side. The first is true scribbling--gang tags and wannabe gang tags. We walked out of the house one day to find Mike's car tagged with a sharpie marker, reading "Big Ass." I didn't take it personally. Bus stops, mailboxes, newspaper vending boxes (what do you call those things?), billboards, and occasionally something more intricate on the side of an abandoned building.

When one happens close to home (like my car), I report it to our local precinct, and sometimes I get a call from the gang taskforce. Big Ass, by the way, isn't any known mover or shaker--a wannabe. For now. Other times, like in 2000 when the back building on the corner was cleared of its squatters and drug dealers, it does mean something--the sidewalk running in front of the building was spray-painted with the gang equivalent of a change of address form.

The other graffiti is anarchist. Yes, anarchists. They spray-paint slogans. Cryptic slogans like "The underground railroad is still running" with a huge question mark below it. Or, on a boarded up building at Lafayette and Compton: "Things are still not equal," with the same punctuation. The standard A in a circle symbol. They interest me in a way that the taggers do not. For instance, they seem to be trying to communicate with ME, not with other anarchists (or, at least, they aren't writing in code). I may not know exactly what they mean most of the time, but when they write "Die yuppie scum" I sure do. Methinks they perchance would not like me.

13. Marbles

My house is 104 years old. I used to think it was 105, but the land was bought in 1904 and the house built in 1905. So my title search/abstract that Mary gave us when we moved in is for the land, not necessarily the house. The folks who owned it first, the Zieglers, owned it for only two years--I can only assume they were the buildesr.

Since then, three families. I've lived here 11 years.. The other two families, the Woltjens and the Kimpler-Murphy-Chapman clan (the Widow Kimpler became the Widow Chapman became the Widow Murphy and then she died, leaving the house to her daughter Mary), take up the remaining 91 years. I know very little about them, and what I do know isn't very complimentary. Mrs. Murphy ran the place as a boarding house. We still have deadbolts (or the holes from the removed deadbolts) on the bedroom doors. There was a makeshift kitchen in the second floor back bedroom (now part of the bathroom). The butler's pantry was ravaged and left as a 3/4 bath with the worst fixtures I've ever seen in any house. When Mrs. Murphy died, and Mary inherited the house, she let her indigent brother live in the basement. She didn't do anything really bad to the house, really. She had the kitchen redone in 1980; our bedroom and the living and dining rooms were given new ceilings around that time. None of it is really that great, though, and every time we change something, I think about how there's one fewer reminder of the Chapman-Murphy mistakes. Like when I finally painted over our hideous bedroom wallpaper.

There's not much left from the former residents these days. A heating oil tank in the basement is hardly sentimental. We haven't mustered the energy to rehab that butler's pantry bathroom, and so we just shut the door for now. That's about it.

But every spring I kneel down in the garden or in the yard, and out pops a marble. Way in back where I grow tomatoes. Under the back porch as I pull up the Virginia creeper vine. When I helped my grandmother plant daffodils. When I put in my two peonies. Front and back yards, one or two each year.

Mary Chapman, I must remember, was born and raised here along with her brothers. They weren't always indigent alcoholics. The Pelikanos family lived two doors down. I'm sure they had a bunch of kids. Are the marbles from the 60s, played with by my father's contemporaries, or are they from the 20's, shot across a dirt playing field by boys my grandfather's age now? I don't know how to appraise marbles like I might a quilt. But I liked this little literal souvenir, and so I kept them in a jar in my kitchen window.

My mom noticed them at some point and thought I was collecting them with some purpose. She picked some up at an antique mall. Now, I have a problem with collections. I love little things. So I didn't suppress this. Only about a third of my marbles are from my yard, but I know which ones are, for the most part.

I held the belief that these were unique to my experience somehow. There are marbles in my yard. This is special. Then I helped my sister move from a two-family flat on Tholozan, and as I was getting directions to the new place, one foot in the car, I looked down. A little orange and white marble, not new, was wedged between the dirt and the curb, exposed by a table leg that had scraped against the ground.

It made me want to take a giant rake to south city and find all the remnants of childhood underneath the daylilies and juniper bushes.

12. Gangway

I grew up in the suburbs. All the suburbs, frankly. Or maybe, better said, the one suburb. They all sort of blend together. Yes, there are different trees and methods of getting your mail, but in the end they are all curvy street neighborhoods with the houses a modest distance apart.

I now live in what was probably considered a "streetcar suburb" back when it was built--I don't live in a high rise apartment building or above a storefront or in a block of flats. I live in a detached house, with its own footprint, with no shared walls with any neighbors.

Between our house and the ones on either side are gangways--about three feet wide, leading from the front sidewalk to the backyard.

Gangway. It evokes a certain image, especially in the city, especially in the summertime. A way for gangs. And there are summer mornings when I find the evidence that my gangway has been traveled: the gate is unlocked and the backyard gate to the alley is ajar. Where our yard leads to, I'm not sure, but it does occasionally serve as a gangway.

But that's not the history of the word. Gang and gangway come from the same root, but gangway doesn't come from the modern meaning of gang. More like gangplank. Gang is related to go, and thus gangway is a going way. A way one can go. And the original meaning of gang is simply a group going the same way--which, having seen gangs move, I can still see.

I like words.

I like gangways, too. I like hearing my neighbors, and I like the idea (in a terrible way) that if someone were to try to axe-murder my family in the middle of the night, Colin and Katie next door might notice. The night this past winter when we heard the woman scream, the first place Mike checked was the house next door. We are close by in the city and I've grown accustomed to the closeness.

11. Parishes

We were standing in Soulard Market. We were in town, visiting my grandparents, and my mom and dad took us down to Soulard. It's a farmers market (and produce resellers market, I mean, they have bananas and avocados there, too), ancient in St. Louis terms (opened in 1779), filled with all sorts of characters. But that's a post for another time.

So we were there. I was twelve, I think, and an older man was talking to my parents, trying to sell them whatever he had at the moment (I think it was a whole box of cabbage). They weren't interested, but my mom got to talking to him about how we were in town from Dallas, but that she and my dad had grown up here.

"Oh," he said to her. "What parishes?"

"Immaculate Heart of Mary for me, All Souls for Terry," was her response. He mentioned where he'd grown up down on the south side--St. Cecilia's, I think.

I thought nothing of this.

Now that I've lived other places and been to other places and realized the whole world isn't Catholic, this strikes me as very odd. That old man didn't know my parents were Catholic, but he asked them what parish they grew up in. Because it didn't matter, in my parents' generation and before, whether you were Catholic or not--you knew what parish you lived in. It was a geographical marker as much as a place of worship (especially if you weren't Catholic).

Houston doesn't act this way; Georgia and Dallas don't have enough Catholic parishes to do this. And nowadays, I don't think even Catholics obey rules of parish geography. We just go to church where we feel comfortable. Right? And we tell people where we live by neighborhood or suburb (All Souls, for instance, could have been "Overland").

Nobody ever asked me what parish I lived in, unless we were already talking about church, until last year. The woman who runs the Irish Dance school we go to had a conversation with me--it turns out she knew my grandmother and her friends and so forth. My German last name dropped away and I became Bridgett BLAKE again. And then she asked, "But you're down in South City now, right?"

I nodded, amused by all this.

"What parish do you live in?"

I told her. And then she rattled off the (maiden names) of the people she knew in my parish. Didn't ask if I attended that parish. The fact that I lived there was enough.

I live in St. Pius V parish, now. When I moved here, I lived in St. Francis de Sales. But now, de Sales is an intentional parish (the Latin mass is said there), and St. Pius V took over its geographical boundaries. Now, Pius goes from Grand to the river. Not easy to pin down location with that. With fewer parishes due to the south side reorganization, I would guess that this question dies a quiet death, to be replaced with the more direct "where do you live?" or "what neighborhood?"

But I still think about places in terms of what church is there. Shaw is synonymous with Margaret of Scotland. Bevo is St. John the Baptist. St. Joan of Arc, Our Lady of Sorrows, St. Anthony. I can envision the typical architecture of the houses that fall in their boundaries. And parishes that are no more--St. Henry or Holy Family, for instance--still have a fuzzy area associated with them.

Now, besides the Presbyterian church that houses my kids' school, and the Lutheran church on the corner, I couldn't tell you what any given protestant church is close to a neighborhood. Of course, protestants don't tend to focus so much on geography as Catholics. Anybody can go to this or that Methodist Church, but there was a time when you couldn't be a member of a parish you didn't live in without the pastor's permission. It becomes ingrained. Even to the point that it spills over to your protestant neighbors.

10. Street Names

Downtown St. Louis is on a Philadelphia model of street names: the north-south streets are numbered, and the east-west streets are trees--in order of hardness of wood, by the way.

South City is done less methodically. There are state names (at one time, I was warned against living on a "state street" due to crime in those areas--except that some of them are so long, it would be hard to generalize like that and take it seriously). There are Indian tribe names--at one time, there were two Kansas Avenues, one for the tribe, one for the street. Now, I believe, there is no Kansas Avenue because one of them became Compton and the other, I forget what it became.

So we have Keokuk and Winnebago and Potomac. My street used to be Powhatan, I believe, until it was changed to a landowner's surname. And we have Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and so forth.

There are vestiges of the downtown streets--there's a 39th nearby, and a 59th further west. And some are named for destinations: Gravois is the road to the dump; Hydraulic, I assume, is named for the brick company; Arsenal is self-explanatory. Others, like Grand and Kingshighway, are lofty descriptions.

West of where I live, Henry Shaw named his streets after things he liked (Botanical, Flora, Magnolia) and people he knew (Gurney). In Tower Grove South, Hartford is named for the insurance company, and Connecticut for the state Hartford is located in. Pestalozzi is a Swiss educator. Blow is an American educator (St. Louis is the home of the first American kindergarten, started by Susan Blow). My aunt lives on Marwinette, named for the wives of the developers of her area (all merged together).

I'm glad I don't live on Sulphur; I kind of wish I had an address on Hydraulic just because it reminds me of the movie Metropolis for some reason. Further west of me, names get odd: Pernod, Tholozan, January (but no February),Landsdowne--without any real rhyme or reason to them. We still have a Goethe Street, but most of the German names were purged during the war. The Irish part of town doesn't have particularly Irish names (Gregg? Tamm?), and besides Marconi, I can't remember anything down on the Hill that sounds Italian.

We pronounce Gravois wrong (Gra-voy) and a professor at SLU once told me no self-respecting Dutchman would ever say Vandeventer the way we do (VAN-duh-vent-er), but instead van-DEV-enter.

St. Louis is not that confusing, though--roads do not change names, and it is essentially a grid system, with a few spokes radiating out from downtown (Gravois, for instance). Tamm is a tricky little street, zigzagging back and forth between crossroads, and some roads pick up blocks after they leave off (like Crittenden). But for the most part, if someone says something to me like "I grew up at Bates & Tennessee" or "It's on the corner of Magnolia and Klemm" I can envision what they mean. I don't know my hundreds-blocks very well (4200 block of Russell, for instance) but I know when they say "Russell before Tower Grove Avenue").

Just remember, if you have holes in your socks, according to my great-great-grandmother Jennie, you're relatives of the Chouteau family (show-toe), and you'll be able to follow directions just fine.

9. One-Way

I live on a one-way street.

I grew up in suburbia, where one-way streets were something you viewed on Sesame Street. I never had to drive on one the first 2 years I had a license. Not until I moved to St. Louis. They used to mystify and infuriate me. I'd be on my way somewhere, and the turn I'd planned turned out to be illegal.

We mocked the Shaw neighborhood when I lived across Grand from them. All those one-way streets spitting out onto other one-way streets. There, of course, the one-ways are compounded by dead-ends, such that it took me 6 months of my daughters' going to school there to learn my way around for sure.

Then we started looking for houses, and found this street. A one-way that terminates at Grand, but such that you can only turn right on Grand. Traffic? Not much. Maybe not such a bad plan. But why was this street, really just this block, westbound only?

The streets around us are two-way. The rest of my street, which is only 4 or 5 blocks long to begin with, is two-way. The street is broad and could easily handle cars in both directions. It was a mystery until I started talking to George. George was the neighbor who had lived on the block the longest. When he and his wife moved in, they had neighbors who had lived here since the block was built. There was a well in the front yard still when he moved here. And George told me the story.

At one time, the northwest corner building was a two-family, or maybe it was a business with a residence upstairs. Then another building was constructed literally in its backyard (probably during the housing shortage of the 1940s). But by the late 60s, it was a tenement. By the 70s, it was a whorehouse.

Tower Grove Park had a seedy reputation as a hook-up locale for gay prostitutes. I knew this, but George repeated it and pointed to that building. That was the hive, or den, or what have you. That's where the prostitutes were. He used to sit on his porch swing at night with a gun on his lap, waiting.

George was not a tolerant man, but he was also a father of several children on a block of rooming houses and prostitutes, so you can see where it stemmed from, perhaps.

In order to control traffic around the building, the city made our street a west-bound one-way. This BEGS the question why they didn't just shut down the illegal activity, but it was the 70s. Who knows.

A few weeks ago, I hailed a car heading the wrong way on my street (it happens at the rate of a couple a week). Wrong way! I shouted. She slowed down and flashed me a grin complete with dimples you could lose a nickel in. "Oh?" she asked innocently. "When did they change that? It wasn't one-way the last time I was here."

I am not one of those easily amused folks I keep hearing about. "So, you haven't been here since 1974?"

It was lost on her. And she didn't turn around. Just waved and grinned and drove up the street.

8. Grand Avenue

My very first memories of home happen in a four-family flat building on South Grand. My mom ironing in the central kitchen-dining area. My bedroom in the back with the 3-season porch right behind. That first Christmas. My mom being pregnant and then we moved away.

It is the only street I have lived on twice: once when I was three, and then when Mike and I first married. We lived about 6 blocks north of where my parents' flat was, in a smaller, not as nice apartment. I like to think I've come full-circle, even though my first residence was in the county, and I don't technically live on South Grand now. I'm a half block from Grand; I can see it from my front porch and hear it at night when things are still in the house.

Grand has many personalities as it travels south from I-70 down to Carondelet Park. I don't know much about it north of the Fox Theater, but it was integral to my life at SLU, since it bisects the campus and students were always jaywalking to get to class on time. The hospitals are on Grand, too--SLU Hospital, formerly Firmin Desloge, and Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital, where I have spent more than my fair share of time the past 2 months.

The area I know best of all, of course, starts just south of Glennon, crosses I-44, and heads into Tower Grove. Shaw is to the west, Compton Heights to the east. The park, the business district, St. Pius V, Carpenter Library. A lot of my time happens in those four places. We walk, bike, and play in the park. We eat gelato and drink coffee and go to the post office and get dry cleaning done and get haircuts and flowers and Vietnamese food and kabobs and and and. St. Pius isn't where Mike and I married, but I was confirmed there and both my girls were baptized there. Leo will be next month. I have sunk a lot of my time and energy into that parish. I used to teach at the school. Right across from the church is the closest library branch to my house, the gateway to any book I might have a whim for (interlibrary loans are lovely).

South of this little area--from my house to my church, basically--things get grungier. There's a Schnucks I don't shop at. A White Castle and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. A Walgreens. Grand and Gravois, it's like, the closer anything gets to Gravois, the dirtier and scuzzier it seems to be. And south of Gravois? Hit and miss. Shuttered old businesses, some residential, one of the two Ted Drewes Frozen Custard locations, Merb's Candy. Turning the bend at Meramec, you get to the area where Mike and I lived, down by St. Mary's High School. The UCC church on the corner is now a mosque. The bakery is a florist; the National Grocery is a Walgreens. Things tumble from one thing to another, and if you don't live life on top of it, you are struck by how much has changed. But things have changed up where I am, too.

Grand ends in Carondelet Park, which I remember from childhood more than I experience as an adult. Loughborough is the termination of Grand, which by that point is a neighborhood street with four-way boulevard stops instead of stop lights. The houses are newer than mine, smaller. It's the way to my Aunt Sarah's house, but otherwise, it's not on my regular route anywhere. I blame the aforementioned Gravois. I just hate that whole area and don't drive through it (and it's too far to walk to get anywhere worthwhile).

I take Grand every day. My one-way street terminates at Grand, and I'm forced to take it northbound. Grand goes everywhere I go, until I turn.

7. Fish Fry

Actually, it's a repost, from my very first month blogging over at South City Musings--three years ago this month. I could rewrite it, but it wouldn't say it as well as I said it the first time. Just got back from fish fry. A woman I'd never met before asked me for my Italian Wedding Cake recipe. Made my day.

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I attend a Catholic Church in south St. Louis City named St. Pius V. Pius was a pope, and he is mostly remembered for not being St. Pius X. Actually, he was elected pope after the Reformation, when the Church was in a state of chaos. He kept things together and struggled tirelessly against the Protestants and the Turks. Pius V was integral to the counterreformation and excommunicated Elizabeth I, encouraged the new Society of Jesus (that would be the Jesuits…), and did any number of good works and, well, pious things. All fine and good; it was a long time ago and, frankly, St. Pius V in St. Louis doesn’t have real strong ties to its namesake. The front façade of the building has a carved stone mural of his good deeds (freed 10,000 Christian slaves from the Turks, for instance), but when I taught at the school, it wasn’t like Pius came up very often, as a St. Patrick’s or Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School might honor their patrons. He is kind of an underdog in the saintly world. The patron of Malta, for goodness sake. Not doctors or firemen or bullfighters (he outlawed bullfighting in Rome). Malta. You can’t walk into Catholic Supply and get a medal of St. Pius V, probably for good reason: even the depictions of him in paintings—short, hunched over, bald, with a beak nose and a long beard—make him look like an evil wizard, not a pope.

An underdog in the archdiocesan world, our church was slated to close two years ago when they came up with the new plan for the south side. There are, frankly, too many parishes, most with segregated roots (meaning that the Germans, Irish, Italians, and Poles all were Catholic (meaning “universal,” ironically), but they weren’t about to go to church together). St. Pius’ territory was carved up into two pieces, half given to Holy Family, and the other half to St. Wenceslaus. The Holy Family, on a side note, is the patron of Reno, and Wenceslaus pays attention to Bohemian brewers (like our hometown Anheuser Busch, for instance).

Obviously, we were saddened and a bit enraged, and we submitted a counter-proposal to the archdiocese. In some ways, from an outsider’s point of view, it made sense: we no longer had a parish school, having merged with the school that is on Wenceslaus’ property (and supported by 7 or more parishes). Our attendance was low, we were relatively poor, and we straddled Grand Ave, which would, perhaps, be a natural boundary for parish lines. When I’d taken the job at the parish school 6 years ago, my ex-principal told me, “well, I hope they stay open long enough for you to get a couple years in.” We are definitely urban in appearance—a big blacktop parking lot serves as a cut through for the drug dealers who live across from the old school building. There’s a broken gate between the lot and a dirty alleyway. No trees, very little landscaping at all. Rundown—sagging, perhaps.

In other ways, though, the archdiocese hadn’t looked very closely: we support immigrants and refugees, we have an active food pantry, our school was successful now that it was merged, and there was some underlying animosity between Pius and Holy Family that meant that our numbers probably wouldn’t “shore up” Holy Family’s decline like they’d hoped. We were also right on Grand Ave, and our church building, unlike the school and lot, was visible and striking. It probably wouldn’t look so good with a plastic banner over the stone mural reading “Joe’s Church of the Living God” if the building was sold, or, as would probably happen in this city, as an empty building, finally razed and replaced with another Walgreens.

The committee listened and agreed, amazingly. It was almost like being in a democracy. We stayed open, as did Wenceslaus. Holy Family closed, St. Francis de Sales became a Latin church, St. Agatha’s became a Polish center (don’t get me started on the Polish church in St. Louis and the archbishop right now, that’s for another day). Shocked by our good fortune, we welcomed some new people, watched as our parish grew just a tad, and started thinking of ourselves as a new parish, one with opportunities and potential instead of unmet needs, seedy neighbors, and dilapidated buildings.

Sr. Mary Henry decided it was time to start up the fish fry. Fish fries in St. Louis are a Lentan ritual. Every Friday, hundreds of families line up at their parish cafeterias, mostly in stale church basements or school gymnasiums reeking of bleach and government cheese, to consume blocks of fried cod and a variety of meatless sides: potato salad, spaghetti, green beans, flourescent yellow macaroni and cheese, applesauce, cole slaw. Some parishes go for french fries and fried shrimp; others serve cheese pizza to the kids. We hadn’t had a fish fry in 4 years, and at the time it shut down, it was a pathetic mockery of what a parish event should be. Bad food, low attendance, stinky church basement with bad lighting. My family went a total of one time.

Mary got a committee together. They in turn got volunteers. Norma made the menu: real fish, hand-breaded. Green beans with tarragon. Potato salad not from a can. It sounded great. Katrina asked for desserts. I don’t like to work with raw fish, so I went with Katrina and baked. I cut cakes and brownies and put them out on plates the morning before our first Fry. Mary was hoping to serve 250 dinners that night. She had no idea what to expect, and the nervous energy in the kitchen was palpable. Everyone was working hard at a new venture, one that could fail miserably as before, or could fill, as Fr. Mike said, “the fish fry gap in South St. Louis.”

I showed up to eat at 6, with husband, daughters, and friend Brian in tow. We stood in line for 30 minutes and then ate the best fish fry food I’ve ever had. Mary wanted 250 to come. We saw over 500. Then the second week, having learned our lessons, we had more food in reserve, more desserts. We set up a second line. We streamlined many things and got more volunteers. And we, again, served over 500 dinners. Fr. Mike mentioned at mass this morning that we had our first Fish Fry convert—someone picked up a registration form on Friday night while listening to our live Irish music and eating Peggy’s rum cake, and decided this was the church they’d been looking for.

So here we are. You might say we are surprised by our success. Having been, frankly, the low man on the archdiocesan totem pole for so long, we find ourselves in the wonderful position of popularity. We have arrived—debuted, as it were. I know, it’s only a fish fry. We still have bills to pay and poor to serve and buildings to repair and there’s always the specter of church closings in our future. We have a new pastor coming in June, and many things will change. It is hard to shift from underdog to top of the heap, to trust that things will work for us, after so much hasn’t worked for so long. I feel a magnitude of energy and happiness at Pius that hasn’t been there in the 8 years I’ve been attending. For the first time, I think I may be living in the “good old days.” Simply amazing.

6. Red Brick

Throughout the south side, everything is red brick masonry construction, which I have heard means that when the big one hits New Madrid, all our houses will liquify. They were built with brick, as opposed to frame, because we had a fire. Not famous like the one Mrs. O'Leary's cow started up in Chicago, but it was still quite a fire. Afterward, very little was built with frame construction.

Many houses have a different brick or stone facades--our block is filled with houses that appear to be white stone or brown brick. But down the sides and across the back, it's all red. The brick is native to the area, coming from quite nearby, actually. The south side is filled with old clay and coal mines.

My house is red brick all around, but the front is a tighter stacking of bricks--like a higher thread count. The mortar is red on the front, too, while it's a lighter pink down the sides and in back. But that's as fancy as the builder got with my house (definitely the plain jane sister to many of the houses here). Still, it's quite an imposing building, this foursquare done in brick instead of frame--it doesn't have the friendly look of the platonic ideal of a foursquare, a big happy farmhouse kind of building. It looks urban, set so close to its neighbors, tall and looming. I like it.

Our alley was red brick, too, until 3 years ago when it was paved over with asphalt. I suspect our street was red brick, since there are still some blocks scattered through South St. Louis with perfect brick--not cobblestone--streets.

Brick houses are easy to care for--we've done nothing but paint some window trim and lament the state of our terrible front porch (added on in the 80s, like a back deck on the front of the house) in the 11 years we've lived here. But they do require care. The four-family block of flats behind us had some drainage issues and we watched as the walls grew moss and mold, and then the mortar started to crumble. It's fascinating to see a brick wall tumble around a doorway, but not so great when it's the house behind you.

5a. Sidewalk photos

Snowfall, March 2008

Block Party August 2007

Hot days Summer 2006

Block "Grandpa" comes to say hi.

Power outage day two, July 2006 (that's Mike in blue, by the way)

5. Sidewalk

Elliot says that places that don't have sidewalks do so to keep the poor people away. This used to make me laugh until I spent more time in suburbs and realized that, yup, sidewalks are few and far between. Not only in the residential areas, but near the strip malls and commercial districts. Huh.

Here there are poor people, obviously. I technically live in the inner city, although it doesn't look like it because "inner city" has many shades of gray that suburban dwellers (at least those who dwell there out of fear of the inner city) do not see. Yes, people are poor here--63118 has an estimated 35% of its population below the poverty line, which, if you live here long enough, know is a big fat lie. It should be much higher, since it's based on a false assumption of how people spend their money these days. 0f the estimated 30,000 people who live in my zip code, that's approximately 10,500 people living on not enough money.

But this is about sidewalks.

Our sidewalks are busy little places. There's a bus stop at the end of the block, so we do have foot traffic back and forth. Usually the same faces. And the park draws people west down our street with their dogs, to the dismay (or excitement?) of my visually impaired rottweiler. But most of the busy comes from children. There are 26 children under the age of 12 on our block, with one on the way. Everybody knows everybody else--there are no strangers hanging out on the stoops and sidewalks here. Passing through, but not staying.

Hopscotch, of course, makes an appearance. Picnics, too. Bikes and scooters fly by, making my bare toes nervous in the summertime. Lots of digging in the tree lawns leads to small piles of dirt and rocks. An occasional smashed brick. One day, Brent walked out to find a large orange traffic cone sitting on the sidewalk in front of his house. No one claimed it, and so it's part of gangway scenery now, brought out when needed for obstacle courses.

Being so close to Grand, trash blows up our way sometimes, and so there will be a mysterious hot-fries package lying on the sidewalk. Passers-by will also litter, always the cheapest brands of beer for us.

Every snowfall produces dads on the sidewalks, shoveling paths. Brent meets up with Mike meets up with Colin. If you're out first, you try to do at least a one-shovel-wide rudimentary start down the length from Ralph's to Corey's. Mike, as I said, will shovel, but so will I (I'm also the only wife/mom who mows grass, but that's another story). I like getting the heart rate up and moving the snow, since here in St. Louis, snow is a soft blanket of 3-6 inches, not anything scary or big. And the sidewalk I'm in charge of is 36 feet long. Not much.

I'm glad the developer, back in 1903-1905, didn't opt to copy Compton Heights and eliminate sidewalks from his plan. I think they make our street more alive. Without them, the kids would be in backyards, cloistered away from each other in their own private spaces. And Dara wouldn't have much reason to bark. And how she loves to bark.

4a. Mike's Thoughts on Alley

"You know, alley clean up day always reminds me of 'Mending Wall'," Mike said when I read him yesterday's entry.

"But isn't that where there are cows?" I said with a giggle--it's an inside joke between us. But then I considered.

Good alleys make good neighbors? Because out front, we can just wave and go about our lives, but when you share power lines, dumpsters, and car parking space, you have to negotiate better?

I remember sitting on the remains of an old ash pit behind me, behind the house I see out my kitchen window, with a lukewarm cup of coffee. Anne sat next to me on the step. We were worried about the developer at the end of the block, and Anne had pretty much alienated most of my side of the alley. I was caught between my front-door neighbors and my back-door neighbor, who was the first neighbor I'd met, who got rid of my cucumber beetles, who sat with the DEA with me in her dining room going over our evidence on the drug dealers. Anne was one of the good guys--so was everybody else, though.

"We will probably lose," she told me realistically. The developer had the alderman on his side and we were just folks. Voters, sure, but not influential, not really. "Get your bottles of wine ready, maybe we'll split one when we lose."

We didn't lose. And in the end, I remained good neighbors and good friends with both sides of the alley. But it certainly took a great deal of wall-mending and wall-removal to walk that fence line.

4. Alley

I like alleys. All of our "services" happen back there--power lines, phone, cable, sewer, trash pickup. Many of us park back there, either in tight garages or parking pads. Every May, we gather as a block (the two halves of the block that share the alley--my side of Halliday and the adjoining side of Magnolia--and clean it. Due to this alley cleaning day, I met my neighbors behind me long before my neighbors across the street.

Our alley used to be brick paved, but our alderman had asphalt put down a few years back. We didn't want it, for various reasons (for some, because brick slows you down, for others, because we like the still-usable to be used). But traffic doesn't seem to go much faster on the asphalt--those threatening dumpster hooks are a good speed-bump--and it sure is easier to keep clean.

City alleys, with their dumpsters instead of private trash cans, are often victims of dumping crime--folks who don't know how or can't be bothered to haul away an old mattress, concrete chunks, construction detritus, or auto parts, like to dump them in the anonymous dumpsters. But my alley is patrolled by several neighbors who keep developers from cheating and have the direct phone line to the "dumpster investigator." But that's not all we do in the alleys.

Kids learn to ride bikes. We trade gardening secrets and produce. We sit on the bump that used to be an ash pit across the way and plot against the developer at the end of the street. We gossip about city politics. We clean up graffiti and watch each other's (literal) backs. We admit pregnancies and steal blackberries. Kids sneak from yard to yard.

My uncle Glennon took down a nasty weed tree that was on the border of our alley and our property this past fall. Now I have a view of everything that happens back there--people trolling for bulk trash that's set out once a month, the neighbors going to work. My kitchen window looks out into the alley and I find I spend a great number of tiny moments at that kitchen window.

People who live without alleys don't seem to get what the big deal is. My brother, down in suburban Houston, thinks it's a waste of space that could be more yard (hmm, and more to mow?). But I wouldn't trade it for more yard or a garage on the front of my house with a driveway. I don't want to drag a green waste cart to the curb and watch trash trucks drive down my street. And I don't want power lines in the front of my house, endangering the street trees. Put all that in back.

3a. Sycamore Photos

View looking east on Utah (sycamore just left of center)

Somewhere in Tower Grove South--this one is like one we lost on Halliday, with the twist and lean.

The sycamore--one of two or three left standing on my block--is behind the sweetgum (which just looks like "tree" here, I know, winter and all)...

Two girls play on a sycamore stump, from a tree taken down after a storm convinced the city forestry department that it was dangerous and ill.

3. Sycamore

Dutch Elm Disease killed the street trees in St. Louis. All the American Elms that lined our streets, and so many other cities' streets, were dead.

St. Louis responded by planting sycamores. The big bark-shedding white trees with leaves as big as two of your hands and the little "sycamore balls" as we called them growing up, with the puffy little seeds that floated off on the wind.

Sycamores grow fast and die badly. They shed limbs--onto your car. They are the tallest trees on the block, and then they get struck by lightning. The one that used to be behind us terrified me. I just hoped it would hit Steve's garage instead of my house. But when the developer took it down in favor of a 4 car garage for her "condo" building (4 tiny apartments, still for sale 2 years later), it changed all the shade and sun patterns in my yard.

Now, when the sycamores die, which they do, being over 30 years old on average, the city knows better than to plant all of the same tree. My street has more than just sycamores--American basswoods, some black oaks. Sweetgums, annoying ornamental fruit trees, and the cursed silver maples.

But I still like the look, however fate-tempting it may be, of a street lined with the same tree every twenty feet or so. It unifies things (although, in the case of south city, most of the houses look the same, too). I would never plant one on purpose, mind you (see two paragraphs above), but I like that they're here.

2a. Stoop Photos

2. Stoop

In my "About Me" section below, I mention sitting on my south city stoop drinking coffee and chatting with neighbors. This is the view from the stoops on my block, down towards Grand Ave. You can see the double set of steps--the "stoop" in my definition is that first set that goes from the sidewalk to the level of the front yard. The second set goes up to the porch.

The first set of steps is the line between public and private space. Businesses leave fliers in the handrail of the first set of steps, but rarely come up onto the porch to deliver them. The mail, of course, is delivered at the front door (which is becoming more and more rare in America these days), but most interaction happens at the first set of steps.

We sit and watch kids play from there--the 5 or 6 moms who either live on my side of the block or know that's where the action is. And yes, I often have a coffee mug in my hand. The kids picnic on the steps, or right above or below them, smoothing out a blanket and producing picnic food from each house--peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, leftovers from the night before, hummus and tortilla, fruit in season.

The stoops on my block are over 100 years old--the western half of the block was built in 1903 and 1904, and my house was the first one in 1905 on this side. The concrete is not in good shape. Mary's is crumbling dangerously, and mine is starting to eat out from underneath. Weeds grow in the cracks, and Trisha comes out with hot vinegar water to kill them (I pluck them from their homes and toss them into the street to be swept away on street cleaning day).

There are intermittent steps, too, that don't lead to the front doors of our houses, but to the gangways between them. This produces a cascade of stairs, I suppose you could call it, heading slowing down the hill towards Grand. The houses are so close, we can spread out between two or three sets of steps and still manage a conversation easily between kid noises and dramas.

It was on Mary's stoop that I sat when the gang walked up our street and attacked Joe and my husband. It was on Trisha's stoop that we ate take out ice cream on the hot 2006 power outage days. Standing on George's stoop, he told us about his wife's cancer diagnosis. We met Elizabeth's new baby from Korea after she brought her down to the stoop (again, the outside world meeting the inside).

Mine has the best shade of the houses on our side where we tend to congregate--that black oak and sweetgum keep the front of my house pretty cool, while Mary has lost a maple and Trisha an ash in the past three years. But it also is prone to mosquitoes due to the ivy growing right next to it. Since they don't bother me, that's where I usually start out on any given warm afternoon. I migrate, though, because conversation is more important than shade.

1. Threshold

My front door is wide. So wide, the screen/storm door in front of Hickory the cat there? Cost more than four months of Maeve's preschool tuition. I use that statistic a lot when the girls let it bang shut on each other. Wide enough that all three cats, if they choose to cooperate, can sit and view the outdoors. Dara the geriatric rottweiler mix usually hovers behind them, waiting for the UPS man to bring her a biscuit. Or just to bark at every other living creature that comes within earshot.

Out my door, I see Jim's house. Our front doors look straight out at each other, although our houses aren't exactly mirror images. I've lived here long enough, it was Mary's house first. And then that weird couple from New York moved in. Now it's Jim's, with his wife and his kids and his hawaiian shirts and dog and sandbox in the back of the truck. Next door to him, the white stone house? That's Doug's place. Independently wealthy man of mystery Doug. Not much to view there. Jim's house has more going on.

Hickory and Dara may watch for juncos and dogwalkers, but I've looked out this door at many things: the badges of FBI and Secret Service agents; homeless men with stolen goods to sell me; neighbors bearing meals after babies are born. I watch the sweetgum tree turn yellow and the black oak turn brown. Kids run up and down the sidewalk while folks east of us walk past on their way to the park.

I like the view.

Coming Soon Enough

I remember standing behind my grandmother's garage with my brother, or maybe a cousin, in this little space between the building and the cyclone fence. Next to us were grapevine trellises, with vines that produced a champagne grape I never tasted. It was a small secret place too small for adults to squeeze into comfortably. Clothesline, white paint, gravel driveway, the smell of gasoline and grease deep in the ground all around us.

That's what I'm hoping for. Except not about a property line in Overland, but about bits and pieces of south St. Louis all around me. Probably some photographs. Maybe daily, once Conlocutio is done, but until then, just little bits. Maybe once a month for now.