Final Post: Growing Up In South St. Louis, Circa 2010

Sophia, Maeve, and Leo live in South St. Louis. They were born here and they will probably spend their entire childhoods here.

They will have a backyard that is barely 30 feet wide. Room enough for a galvanized pool, a swingset, a hammock, a deck, and a garden. They will have access to an alley through the back gate, and to the front yard and the street through the gangway. Mostly, they will play on the sidewalks in the front, riding bikes and scooters up and down the block all summer long. In the shade of street trees, they will sit on stoops and eat homemade popsicles that drip down their chins.

Their house was built in 1905 of red brick. It is a four-square construction and their bedrooms are tucked into the attic.

They will grow up in a city with one of the best public library systems in the country; the free museums and zoos are far better than a city of this size deserves. They will take public transportation and walk to south Grand to get ice cream. Their school is in a church basement ten blocks north of their house, sticking to its promise of being a neighborhood school. Full of city kids and city parents and everyone is just like them, only more so.

They might not have a yard worth mentioning, but Tower Grove Park is across Grand. And the Missouri Botanical Garden is just a mile or so away.

I thought for a long time I would raise my children in a rural location, homeschooling, going against the grain. But the longer I sit on the stoop here, the more deeply connected I become to my neighbors, the more I realize I'm a city girl. My kids are city kids. And I'm not afraid of that.

When we were looking for a house, Mary, my co-worker who lived on Hartford, whose sister Kate is Maeve's godmother now, whose niece Rachel made me the teacher I am today, said to me, "come join us in South City."

We did. And now those three kids of mine sit in my living room on a wood floor that is 105 years old, playing dominoes and watching a DVD and singing songs about photosynthesis. I feel finally like they, and I, are living an authentic life. We live here. We are here. This is who we are. Geography is destiny. Choose wisely.

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.

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.

2a. Stoop Photos

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.