tenth

The back of houses they stick out into alleys naked and exposed. Flowers blindly bloom in gardens that have long been lost to forgotten ambition. The sidewalks slope and crack in too much of a hurry to stay down properly.

With it's newly cut grass and broken canopy of maple trees it smells like Harvard-Yale. But the display of blight, broken bricks, overgrown shrubs, houses divided like cake with too many front doors, and the aged apartment buildings that grow like weed vine among the homes, give it away for what it is; Sugar House.

Why did we did leave here? It was the question I asked myself the first day I slipped around the corner with the dog on a leash heading up one of the Avenues. I had waited on 11th East watching Beach turn the key, let herself into the front duplex for her cat sitting job. Once she was in I had about an hour to kill. So I went walking.

It was a temporary arrangement. One month, two times a week. At noon we would drive up 17th South; drive backward through time. It reminded me of the nanny job I took when Beach was 3.

A three-month commitment.  It too took Beach and me up the hill, a few hours, a few days a week, for a few months. Interlopers in someone else's life.  That one was a cold white house hanging high over the valley on the foothills.  I would drive the streets and park my VW van with the other cars of the workers.  For all the money and the mansions the only people home were the maids and the tradesmen... and the nannies.

From the first seconds of that job, I was homesick for the valley floor. I would pick up the 2-year-old daughter from nursery school. Drive her home. Feed her a lunch of carefully dictated leftovers. Let her watch one episode of Madeline, read her one book, put her down for a nap, then wait to be excused by the grandmother "who would take it from there".

In my memory, there is no sound. The rooms tucked in between marble and carpet and the privacy money can buy all lay in a silence that is almost dead. Surely haunted.

Sugar House is the opposite. Even the job flipped: it was Beach who was working while I wandered.

I would weave my way up and down the streets crossing my own history.  I would find myself staring into a yard, into blank windows, down long driveways. I imaged the people who lived in each house.  I pressed my feelings against the apartment houses and wondered what it would be like to live there- alone.  I cut down alleys over broken glass along leaning fences and off-street parking pads.

One day it was raining; we still walked. The dog, more than reluctant but I had a question to answer and time to kill.

Yesterday was the last day. I waited for Beach to get inside the apartment then I headed out to say good-bye to my afternoon sessions with Sugar House. Mailed a letter at the post office before setting off into the rows of houses that had become my backdrop.

Why did we leave Sugar House? For space, for land, for freedom.

I miss the idea of it sometimes. Miss the idea of clean uniformity of bricks and clapboards that trickles out of Harvard-Yale. It runs downhill splashing out into the streets around Sugar House Park, it dots the shopping district; drying out around 2nd East.
   
I don't miss the interlopers. The dog walkers. The pet sitters. The traffic. The trees that lean and the sidewalks that break. I don't miss the thick bungalow where it was always winter, even when the flowers were blooming.

We moved west to stand in a field as the sun came up.  We moved west to be able to leave our bikes on the front porch while going in for a glass of water and not come back to them gone without us. We moved because of property taxes and horrible neighbors and nowhere to park.

We moved west so we could go walking along the river.

"The house on tenth west liked junk.  We didn’t know it when we fell in love and bought it.  A realtor’s nightmare with dead animals mounted on the walls, overstuffed rooms, gaping valances, and dusty curtains.  The day we were shown the house we stepped around the piles, navigated rooms so full we were not allowed to open closed doors.

We bought her anyway and moved across town.  Down 1700 South over the tracks and through the industrial warehouses, onto a wide residential street that seemed to stretch forever.  We were in by Halloween.  Ripping up carpets, tearing down cabinets and curtains, stripped her bare and we all started over." ~Taming Venus, mlb

What else I hadn't known was that we would spend the next twelve years curing the house on Tenth of her need for possessions. And as much as we have changed her, she has changed us. Once we were a family of Sugar House refugees, a child of Harvard-Yale and a child of the world, moving from under the shadows of institutions like Dartmouth and the mighty U; we are not that anymore.