Brooklyn Roots

Once stirred, those memories rolled out in bursts, demanding recording. A description of the neighborhood of her youth emerged: her father’s pharmacy, shops along the avenue, and the house with its magnificent purple irises peeking above a stone wall as tall as a four year old. A small garment is remembered in detail: a dolls dress made from an old pillowcase, using a needle encrusted by baked on grease from the stuffed chicken necks her grandmother prepared; this the woman who braided the authors hair so tightly as surrogate parent while her parents worked to provide for them all in an era emerging from the Great Depression. There was the school she attended when the war began, and the celebrations at its end, and the places she and her friends explored as they grew. Her recollections of the neighborhoods artifacts appear as she envisions pickles and egg creams. Each shop along the 13th Avenue of her memory is sustained in its original character, even the corsetiere and milliner of the past, stuck there in time.