Talking Stones, Churchbells, and Sparrows - Living in Pen Lucy

Six years into my big adventure, I love living in Baltimore.

One of the things that blew me away immediately was an experience I first had in Montmartre, maybe seven years ago.  I was standing there wondering which way I should continue walking, when my mind was overwhelmed by a sudden burst of the most memorable sound I have ever heard, a combination of churchbells and sparrows.


Baltimore still rings its churchbells, which are often old and discordant.  Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I visualize someone’s great-grandmother singing on her 100^th birthday.  My family left Baltimore when I was six or seven, so I had forgotten about the churchbells until my recollection was rekindled as I worked my first vacant lot, Bonvenon.  I was so surprised by the mix of carillons and birdcalls, I stood up straight, my scythe stilled.


I have written about Baltimore’s bugs!  The good side of Baltimore’s bugginess is that there are lots of songbirds.


And finally, the stones.  Baltimore neighborhoods are full of old rockery, stonework, and brickwork from a bygone era.  I find myself trying to hear them, trying to read them, like runes.   They pull me to them.  I touch them.  I listen.
 
Eight months out of work, I have had time to enjoy my neighborhood, which is called Pen Lucy.  Although I am a nonbeliever, I volunteer for a faith-based nonprofit that serves my neighborhood.  You could say that taking me on showed its commitment to diversity.  The nonprofit’s ethos is rooted in a verse from the Bible’s Book of Jeremiah:  Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have sent you.  While the nonprofit offers many community services, its most recently initiated project is to revamp a corner lot a few blocks from my home on a windblown little street called Frisby.  This is not the first time Pen Lucy’s potential beauty has been noticed.  Before I purchased my house, H&GTV created a memorial garden on my block whose wall of roses explodes every year.


The anticipation of a tiny paradise on Frisby is exciting.  The volunteers who will converge on the plot – which is already cleared and fenced – are expected to be a mixture of believers, that is, earnest believers in the worth of revealing Pen Lucy’s good bones. This includes my husband, who hopes to break ground with them on their scheduled attack day.


I came from Seattle with no preconceptions about Pen Lucy, but Pen Lucy has an unfortunate reputation based on a wild past and frequent drug arrests today.  Even when I purchased my home in 2008, there were many abandoned buildings.  The businesses looked beat up but were of a nature that I found myself returning.  Passengers in the airport vans have tittered when the driver rolled up in my neighborhood.  It might not occur to them that I was coming from a jaunt overseas or handling bicoastal domestic affairs, and yet live here when, in fact, living here allowed me to afford other aspects of my life.  People miss that the yards are maintained and people say “ma’am.”  They do not hear children playing.  They look past the big, ivy clad trees, the riot of honeysuckle, and the beautiful old churches – in my neighborhood, there are four within two blocks of my home.  The “blessed evening” crowd I speak of now and then hums quietly under Pen Lucy’s bad press.
 
Nonprofits and volunteers break out their donated computers, garden tools, and checkbooks, but Pen Lucy has been sufficiently debauched that in public venues like conferences, I have seen a professional speaker not bother to neutralize expressions of distaste, playing to a room that offered no dissent, leaving me speechless.


And yet, Pen Lucy is a great neighborhood.  I wake up to birds and old school, traditional men greeting each other and getting ready for a day of labor; rain, shine, or otherwise.  I remember wanting my realtor to find me a “housy house with a porchy porch in a neighborhoody neighborhood” and this is exactly what I got.  This is where I envisioned years ago that, having spent decades being retrofitted as a maiden lady, I would retire to a lifestyle of urban gentility filled with redhats, housecats, and wicker.


Pen Lucy’s woes have their origin in truth, so I am glad I did not raise my sons here during Pen Lucy's wild past.  But I hold out hope of entertaining my grandchildren in a little universe of talking stones, churchbells, and sparrows.