Whitewash and Boredom

Sheldon Avenue in Baltimore was where my maternal grandparents lived, the home where my mother grew up, the place my brother and sisters and I dreaded visiting. Or at least I dreaded visiting. It was an orderly street of row houses and sycamore trees, with long concrete staircases at the lower end, shorter staircases at the top end where the street intersected with Belair Road. Belair Road was the limit they’d placed on our wanderings; we were not to cross the six busy lanes of asphalt under any circumstances.

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.