Diaries and Disasters - Pandemic 2020

A good deal of historical interest is as much involved with TIME as with People or Places.  So in April of the Spring of the Pandemic, I am not going to historic places, but I am still here and visiting other kinds of historic places - places in time.
As I have no doubt mentioned, if you have visited my blog before, I was born and raised in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It was living in a warren of red brick row homes with porches that were either enclosed or factory issue open.  Sadly, our porch was enclosed, which gave us a kind of additional room, but blocked us off from the life in the block.  
Since I have been isolated for 5 weeks, having seen only the people in the Supermarket once a week, or a neighbor to yell "hi" to across the street, and one brave risk taking friend who has come to walk and have lunch a couple of Fridays.
But back to Philadelphia - when you live there and you are the kind of child who takes notice of things, you become acquainted with the long, episodic, mysterious and horrible history of the city.  There is the eternal flame in Washington Square Park, which I was always told was created as a monument to the 1500 soldiers buried beneath who died of camp fever, smallpox, or wounds at the time of the Revolution.  There is the large, ornate water fountain that says "A merciful man is merciful to his beast."  It was a reminder to  cart drivers to let their thirsty, tired horses have a drink.It makes you imagine the throngs of horses and carriages in the Philadelphia streets.  Not too hard to have to imagine as my vivid new isolation induced memory reacquaints me with the memory of the huge, old, monumental creatures that were the horses that pulled the produce wagons up the alleys where we lived.
I wrote a blog entry about Stone House Lane here a long time ago, that's where the vegetables were coming from - the truck farms south of where we lived, before they took the farms by eminent domain and built the airport.  
There was so much history still alive and current then; we took school trips to the Abbots milk bottling plant, those rattling wind chimes of milk bottles zooming along on conveyer belts.  
Many many years later in my daughter's childhood, we spent a lot of time when I picked her up from my mother's in New Jersey, after work, and we went back to the city in time for a couple of hours at Independence Park Mall, so green, with a row of hidden yard gardens on a side wing of the park.  
Sometimes the film industry would be in town during the years I lived there as an adult, before I moved my daughter and myself to New Jersey again.  The horses would be back! and extra's walking around fanning themselves in the warmth.
In Philadelphia, you were reminded of the dead, and the plagues, like yellow fever.  Our church cemetery had the graves of so many small children, little marble lambs for markers and the extraordinary, to me, dates.  Kids my age had died!  Our church, itself, built in the late 1600's by Colonial Swedes, a model of their ship hanging in the middle aisle, and their names on the brass markers on the walls.  
A once popular Heinlein novel observed that the streets of a Martian City had become so overcrowded with memories and feelings that the streets were no longer habitable, and the people had to migrate to a new planet.  If you could see or hear them through the clues down at child's eye level in the city, you would regains that feeling, of the history haunted streets.

My school, looking like nothing so much as a great hulking Dicken's style brick factory, is still standing, Fel School, on Oregon Ave.  Certainly going to school there was better than the situations so many of the children in my books were experiencing, such as Jane Eyre, or any of Dicken's children, or even Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer.  My school was definitely more Bronte' but it might cripple you but not necessarily kill you.  I have a few happy memories from that place, one involving bringing in a toothbrush from home, and a tree leaf, if you were lucky enough to live on a block with a tree.  And we put the leaf on a sheet of folded construction paper, dipped our toothbrushes into white tempera paint, dragged them across a wooden framed screen and spatter painted a silhouette of the leaf.  It was a wondrous miracle to.

Time to leave the past and head to the porch.
Hoping you are staying safe and well and enjoying, as much as possible, your solitary house arrest!*
Jo Ann

*Don't even let me get started on the ghosts and stormy emotions flowing down the old prison corridors!