Where I Grew Up
Where I grew up was a town of 8,000 people in western Pennsylvania. It was a steel mill town then, with railroad tracks running through the center of town. Now the mills are closed and all but one of the railroad tracks is idle. We lived in a red brick house on East Main Street, a house that had been my grandparents'. My life, when I was little, pretty much existed on Main Street. If you went out of our house and headed east on Main Street, you came to one of the entrances of the steel mill where my father worked, and where he walked to work every day for 35 years. It's still there, although some of the buildings are empty and the furnaces don't fire anymore. And across from the mill sits a row of houses, one of which was my great-grandparents'. I went to school on West Main Street, ten blocks away from my home. I could walk in a straight line and not have to zigzag across town to get home, which made my mother happy. My school was right down the block from my other grandparents' house, also on West Main Street, and across the street from the church where our family went to Sunday mass. If you keep heading west from the school, you pass the town cemeteries, one Catholic, one non-Catholic, where both sides of my family are buried. Life was simple when I was little. It was very linear.
Where I Live Now
I live in an apartment across from Ithaca High School. It's a basement apartment — spacious for me — one bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. It's full of bookcases, cat toys, filed and unfiled papers, and my phobias. I somehow find it comforting to live partly underground. My apartment is next to the laundry room, which means I don't have to go up and down stairs to do my washing, and I have nice neighbors. The apartment complex is right next to Lakeview Cemetery. As you drive into the parking lot, you can see Ezra Cornell's family mausoleum on top of the ridge above the apartments. My living room windows look out on a hill leading up to the cemetery. The hill has maple and walnut trees, some bushes, and an occasional empty flower pot that gets blown down from one of the graves.
