Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of the east side of Buffalo, New York, sometime in the mid 1980’s. Buffalo was undergoing a historic transformation from a vital industrial and manufacturing city to a service oriented one. Steel plants closed. The population drastically declined with nearly one in four moving out of the city to find work. Skilled laborers were left reeling, neighborhoods seemingly lay in ruins. It was against this backdrop that I grew up. But the crumbling wasn’t crumbling to me. What I mean is that within it, the crumbling was something else, something distinguished. It carried a patina of the hard work of generations. We climbed, and bicycled, and ran through this landscape of rocks and soggy lawns and brick buildings with brass door knobs. Of steel railings, canvas awnings, and concrete. It was translucent glass, old wires, engines, and flowers. It was foreign accents, incense, and Franciscan nuns. It was the bent chain link fence that demarcated yards which separated but somehow also brought neighbors together. I am not sure what I am saying, the chain link fence allowed you to look through; it gave you a line but one you could cross visually. It is this openness of the chain link fence that stays with me. When I was little I would put my eye to look through one of the diamonds that the chain link fence made. I would look through that diamond to the space it contained and move to another, piecing the neighborhood together like that bit by bit. In the best of the backyards, the chain link fence was a tool, it carried the trailing vines of peas, and cucumbers. It carried the vines of wisteria and rose and grape. The fences became living things in those yards, like hedgerows you see in the countryside and this too is important. The east side of the Buffalo, New York of my youth was a dying industrial city but it carried within it the old homelands of rural Europe, of Poland, Italy, Germany, and Ireland. At dusk, neighbors pulled weeds or smoked and stopped, elbows on the top pipe of the fence, to share a moment, laugh or memory with their neighbor who did the same while their children tumbled nearby seeing without looking, learning without the lesson.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of the backyard of 7 Dorris Avenue on the east side of Buffalo, New York. It doesn’t look like much. This was the tiny patch that was my grandmother’s backyard. When I was little she would pull out a wooden sandbox with a little colored canvas roof and set it there so I could climb in to play. She’d give me a bucket of water so that I could make rivers and lakes. She hung laundry on the line that blew in the breeze like ghosts. I have a photograph of my grandfather standing in that backyard. He is with my mother when she was a little girl. He died when she was five. In the photograph, I can see the laundry line pole and I can see the little wire fence. There is no sandbox. There is a little terrier I never knew. I look into the eyes of my mother as a child and see her as an adult. I look at the plants in the photograph. Scrutinize them. One summer I hacked away the overgrowth in her backyard and came to a cluster of hyacinth. They were planted from Easter gifts from the past and all at once, below the overgrowth from the scrub trees and shrubs, there they were again. Off-handedly, she told me the date she planted them, cut some flowers and brought them inside. The wood of the sandbox rotted away. My grandmother and mother are just photographs now. The house still stands, last one nearest the corner now after a fire took the neighboring one. I like to imagine the hyacinth she planted has taken over and blooms in purples and whites. It is the fragrance of the hyacinth that brings me back to her. There she is again with the scissors cutting the stems at an angle. The heavy flower heads bending the weak stalk. There is my mother again. There is the sandbox with its river of tap water. There is the colored canvas and the sheets blowing on the line. The photograph is the silent reminder. I want to be able to hear her Polish accent in it, I want to hear her swear when she drops a wooden clothesline and takes another from her pocket. I want to hear the sound of the shovel in the sand, hear the water carve away the river. I want to see the hyacinth in the glass on the kitchen table, the room a perfume. I go back there. To the glass on the table. I stand at the sink and look out the window to the backyard, to the wire fence, to that summer’s overgrowth and everything I carry within.