Dudley was staring at my I refrigerator. A neighbor, he had come by at the suggestion of a mutual friend to measure my small fireplace for a custom-made screen. As it turned out, my house had strong associations for him. He’d known the couple who bought it in the late 1950s and lived here until they died — she, just five years ago. Libby was beloved by many in these parts. She ran an antique store that covered the gamut from junk to genuine rarities, and she was legendary as a character and cook. The real estate agent who sold me the house last spring had known Libby, too, and said there were seldom fewer than 12 around the table at her rollicking dinners. I delight in her old Crown stove, with two ovens and two broilers and six gas burners.
But it was the undistinguished hulk of the refrigerator that had Dudley’s attention, as we finished our turn through the house and came into the kitchen. “That was Libby’s,” he said. “We gave it to her. It was a present for her and Gibby’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and all her friends chipped in.”
I mention this pleasing moment not because it was remarkable but because, on the contrary, it typifies the village where I live. I live on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
I moved back here in May, after 13 years away, in the heartland first, then in the suburbs. When people ask me, amazed, why anyone voluntarily would trade the space and security and abundant bathrooms of a leafy Virginia development for the high taxes, creaky services, and crime of Marion Barry’s Washington, D.C., my answer is ready: I came back for aesthetics and for community.
Age imparts harmonies to houses. In my neighborhood of tree-lined residential streets, Korean corner stores, small parks, and grand white marble monuments, the oldest dwellings have the poise that comes with two centuries’ maturity; my own frame house dates from around the Civil War. More numerous are two- and three-story brick townhouses put up between the 1870s and the Depression. The small front gardens-some manicured, some overgrown — are rimmed with iron fences. You notice them, because here people walk.
Years ago, I walked these streets pushing a double stroller. I spent evenings in dozens of these houses, as a member of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op (which is still going strong, with nearly 90 member families). The house where my mother died is here. So is the big corner house, scene of the world’s best parties, with its tower and verandas and 19 rooms, where a friend presides, patriarchal at 72, over the block where he was born. Just a little further on — almost shouting distance from where I live — is the public school where my children learned to read, a handsome Victorian pile on Stanton Park.
Friends we made back then through a parent-run neighborhood day care group have never left. In the intervening years, the church where my godchildren — now in college — were baptized has acquired new overlays of meaning, from a funeral, a marriage, fine evenings of community theater, and innumerable Christmas pageants that saw my niece and nephews successively promoted from sheep to shepherd to member of the Holy Family.
But the quintessential local institution rerains the Eastern Market. An old- fashioned food market in an 1870s building with crafts and country produce outside, it is bright in all seasons; there are daffodils in spring and pumpkins in the fall and faces year-round. Buying some apples the other morning from a woman in woolen gloves, I asked her whether it were possible I remembered her from 20 years ago. “Honey,” she said, a smile liglting her face, “I’ve been coming here since 1948.”
Always a Saturday gathering place, the market also provides first jobs for neighborhood teenagers, who help the farmers set up their stalls in the early morning. Across the street, Libby Sangster’s Antiques on the Hill opens a little later; her daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren live above the store.
When I leave Libby’s house for work every day, I go either of two ways.
If I go right and immediately right again, I Crive down East Capitol Street toward the Capitol, looming just five blocks ahead. For me, no disillusionment at has yet robbed the wedding-cake extravagance of that dome of all power to inspire.
If I go left, down Fifth Street, I’m heading straight for a graceful equestrian statue of Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s favorite general. Needles to say, generations of neighborhood children have longed to climb up and ride behind the dashing young Greene, though no one I’ve asked can name any who succeeded.
Long ago, when the builders’ hammers were first ringing at my little house, the country Greene helped found was only 80 years old. I like to think that he and his gallant friends would not tel altogether estranged if they could come back and visit my neighborhood in 1995.
CLAUDIA WINKLER
