Twenty-seven years ago today at Johns Hopkins Hospital, after six weeks of lingering, my mother lost her eight year struggle. I visited her almost daily until the end, but with no budget for parking, I often wound up depositing my car on Madison Street.
I'm hypersensitive to color - I see hairs of difference between hues - but the houses I passed and parked in front of always seemed the exact same, appropriate to my mood, lifeless shade of grey, no matter how and when the sun settled upon them. In the ensuing years, they still appeared drained of color every time I encountered them. And I say this as a person who never met a house she didn't like.
Five years ago, when my niece was treated and cured of a rare disease at Hopkins, I had another two-month round of daily sightings. The EBDI project had just come alive with plans to slay these blocks of boarded-up buildings. Ask me what I do for a living, and for decades I've unceasingly defined myself as an historic preservationist, but knowing there wasn't must else to be done, I put my professional opinion in stasis. I didn't watch. I just didn't want to know. And when I needed to know, it was OK. I pay no mind to those who think I've lost my mind, my ideals, my standards, my soul.
Today, as I ponder my mother's all-too-short life and my niece's miraculously normal one, I think about the life and near death, and then again, life, of one of Baltimore's great neighborhoods, and how grateful I am to be alive to participate in its rebirth.
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