Pittsburgh was its usual mix of family, topography, and bridges. I stayed with my mother and we had a lot of fun together, as we usually do. She doesn't drive anymore and loves to get out whenever she can, so we went driving and looked at things. On a sunny morning we set out, zoomed through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, then burst out, crossing the Fort Pitt Bridge, into the bright light to see the sun on the Monongahela and the big shiny new buildings that make up the new downtown Pittsburgh. Took a right hand turn onto the Parkway and soon we were in Squirrel Hill.
Mom wanted to see our old house on Windermere Drive in Swisshelm Park. To get there from Squirrel Hill you go up Forward Avenue, cross Beechwood Blvd., then start down the long trek of Commercial Road. In winter that road was a nightmare. Quickly we found the house and mom asked me to park the car so she could look at it.
My father made the decision to leave Squirrel Hill and move to a different neighborhood. Mom and I talked about his motivation, what made him decide this. He died many years ago and I would so like to talk to him about it now. What did this move mean to him? There was only one Jewish family living there then. Was this his form of claiming independence? It seems a fitting question on Independence Day.

After this we went over to the street I keep writing about and probably will never completely stop--Shady Avenue Extension. There was our old house but the black locust tree had been cut down. That tree always had flowers at the end of August, drenching everything with its almost too sweet scent. I remember my mother sweeping up the flowers that dropped onto our walkway in the evenings, only to repeat the activity again the next day.

Over the years, as I made the journey back to Pittsburgh from Media, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia, I would experience two emotions upon leaving Pittsburgh and returning home: misery at having to leave my home town and a desire to change myself in some way. The changing part of this usually took the form of a new dieting plan to lose weight. If you're already despairing why not go for broke and make yourself profoundly miserable? Fortunately this passed and I live in a different part of the state now (along with a new state of mind;) the rural area around Bloomsburg, PA on ten acres in a farmhouse that was built in the 1850s. So there is a new kind of coming and going, the joy of journeying to my hometown combined with the desire to come home.