Edgerton.

I found out recently that Annie Dillard, one of my all-time favorite authors, grew up on a street only three blocks from the house where Brad and I now live. Annie Dillard is one of three authors along with Fitzgerald and Steinbeck whose language I was introduced to in graduate school and even after the hours of dissection and de-mystifying I continue to love more and more with every read and re-read.

After moving, I finally started reading An American Childhood, the beautiful memoir about her full and carefree childhood in a privileged Pittsburgh family, and in one of the first chapters she names the street where she watched the seasons pass, where she grew into herself, and where she read furiously.

Edgerton Avenue.

I had no idea - out of all the streets in this city, she grew up on one of "our streets" - one of the ones we've walked the dogs down every week since August, having no idea what history it holds!

She writes, "Walking was my project before reading. The text I read was the town; the book I made up was a map...I pushed at my map's edges. Alone at night I added newly memorized streets and blocks to old streets and blocks...On darkening evenings I came home exultant, secretive, often from some exotic leafy curb a mile beyond what I had known at lunch, where I had peered up at the street sign, hugging the cold pole, and fixed the intersection in my mind. What joy, what relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door!- joy and relief because, from the very trackless waste, I had located home, family, and the dinner table once again."

What great fun to read about our streets in the 1950s-60s through the words of one with such imagination and brilliance. Each description she makes - of the catholic schoolchildren walking to the school on our street, of the padlocked garages and stone houses I have photographed over and over, of the fresh snow on frozen streets, of the gravel pathways in Frick Park - they all feel like home to me now.

I'm really glad that Dr. Ryan didn't assign An American Childhood while I was in school, for I would have had no idea how to appreciate it. Then I wouldn't have known how to picture her large city home on Edgerton Avenue with its lonely side-yard swing; now I know exactly what she's talking about.