Fall Creek Drive

We spent about one year living with my grandparents in Ithaca while my mom went to graduate school at Syracuse University. My grandfather was a renowned professor of Collective Bargaining/Labor Relations at Cornell and we lived in a stately white-washed brick home overlooking the gorge on Fall Creek Drive. Grandpa was an avid gardener, and I remember making the snapdragons talk by squeezing the petals in just the right way. (When my brother attended Cornell many years later, his friends noticed the house from across the gorge and named it The Secret Garden House, not realizing that it was his grandparents' house.) My grandmother loved having us live with her, especially my brother, whom she doted over. She had a baby grand piano that she played with fingers transformed by arthritis. She taught me how to set up and do dishes properly in the sink and I begged often for this privilege of standing on the stool and helping.

The house was beautiful, with a matching brick wall which stretched out around the back yard, culminating in a little building with a turret, where we kept the pet mice in the nice weather. My brother and I spent most of our time in the basement watching TV. The basement had many rooms with lots of interesting things to look at stored on shelves. Grandpa had a woodworking studio in the back room, which was always covered with shavings. My sister lived in the attic, where she had her own bathroom, of which I was envious. The house always had a certain smell, as if the windows were never opened.

I started preschool, my brother elementary, and my sister yet another in a long string of new schools. My mom would come visit on the weekends in her old Saab named Fritz. I don't remember this being a particular unhappy time, but I do remember dramatic and tearful scenes clinging tightly onto my mother's car door on Sundays when it was time for her to go back to Syracuse.