From My Grandmother's Files: Gran and the Jungle
by Shirley A. Littleford Johnsen
Mother, Dad and I lived in the 2100 block of Alameda Avenue. My grandmother, Eleanor Koordt, had an apartment on the ground floor of an old house next door to a huge, fenced-in empty lot on the corner of Sherman Street at the juncture of Central, Encinal and Sherman.
“2120” was built by my father in 1919. I was two and a half years old when we moved in. It was a stormy winter night, the very night my father paid the last months’ rent on our house at Fernside and Liberty Avenues. The landlord had doubled the rent after my father notified him that we would be moving in six months. So the brothers-in-law, Paul Dufour and Ed Silver, husbands of the Koordt sisters, and their brother John Koordt came to the fore and moved us in while Dad was busy nailing windows shut in the new house.
One summer morning before I entered kindergarten, my mother allowed me to walk all by myself to “Gran’s.” It was a distance that seemed, for my five years, far beyond the frontiers of my home boundary. It out-distanced the trips to the Acme Grocery around the corner, where I occasionally bought a loaf of bread for my mother, or to the “Chestnut Street Station” where my aunts operated a beauty salon on the mezzanine floor of a pharmacy.
Since I couldn’t read the street signs, Mother gave me verbal directions. She admonished me to keep to the left, reminding me that my “left” was the arm on which I wore my little gold bracelet. I marched down Alameda Avenue determined not to reveal my anxiety.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Kiri's Queries to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.