Home

It is our annual pilgrimage to Cleveland Park. I would say "to DC" but when I come home I tend to isolate myself in my old neighborhood, with the exception of a few jaunts down to the museums. I spend the week teaching at my old summer camp (the campers are ages 5 - 9, the counselors ages 11 - 14; it takes place on the wooden porch of a 19th century house), swimming at my old pool (it takes three strokes to swim a length), checking out books at the library (from the woman who was the librarian when I was a child), strolling through the zoo to see the new borns, walking up to the Macomb Street playground past my elementary school, waving to neighbors who have known me since I was Josie's age and inquiring after kids I used to babysit who are now graduated from college. The air is always thick, heavy, moist at this time of year, evenings punctuated by thunder and monsoon-like downpours. I come home each summer so my children can experience my own childhood for a moment. So I can experience them experiencing my childhood. So I can experience my own childhood again through them. When Josie holds on to the bar around the parking lot next door and dangles from her chubby arms, her bum barely grazing the grass, I remember so clearly when I too could dangle. Tonight I chased fireflies with Jasper in the Bishop's Garden at the Cathedral, and my heart raced like a four year old's. If I lived here, perhaps these moments would be lost in the details of my adult identity. But since visits are few and brief, it's as if my childhood has been placed in a time capsule, only to be breached when the kids rush out to send sticks down the gutter rivers in between strikes of lightning, or Jasper begs to rent a stroller at the zoo even though he can very well walk, or Josie bites into a scalding slice of Vace's pizza and burns the roof of her mouth... for the thousandth time.