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Fortress with a Moat of Traffic by Melody Grewell For my entire life, my family has only ever lived in one place. Our home is in Silver Spring, Maryland, at a very busy intersection. The house is about a half mile from the D.C. line, from the Silver Spring Metro station on the red line, and from the Capitol Beltway exits that everyone uses to get from the suburbs to the city. The house is like a fortress. It seems like you always see it, but can never get to it because of the moat of traffic whizzing by at 40 miles per hour. Because of the location of our house, everyone who lives in the greater D.C. area knows exactly where we live when I describe it. It’s at the corner of 16^th Street and 2^nd Avenue, and the post holding the traffic lights is down in the front-left corner of our front yard. The house itself is a fifty year-old brick colonial with peeling white gables and ivy growing up the front wall. It’s built on a hill and we have seventeen steps and two landings going up to the front door, so it looks dauntingly large to passing traffic. Our driveway is very short and very steep, making it look like some sort of a ramp to go crashing through our side porch. And on top of that, to get in and out of the driveway, you have to either zip through or back into six lanes of traffic. The house is in the bad part between two good neighborhoods, and our next-door neighbors have been robbed several times. But, in the thirty-some-odd years that my dad has owned our house, it has never been broken into. My dad attributes that fact to his cleverness in putting little stickers on our storm doors that say, “WARNING: ALARM SYSTEM.” But really, I think it’s because there’s nowhere to park. As if someone would hatch out a big plot to rob our house, park in our steep little driveway, climb all seventeen steps, and then see a business-card sized sticker and turn around and run away. All my life, I have always felt safe in that house. Being from an urban area I assume that there is safety in numbers, and because there is traffic going by my house 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I feel like our house just can’t be touched. When I was little I used to have trouble sleeping (because my little sister who slept on the bottom bunk had a snoring problem), and I used to watch the cars go by and watch the traffic lights change as a way to confirm that everything was as it should be and comfort myself into falling back to sleep. The lights start blinking at midnight; the lights facing 16^th Street blink yellow, and the lights facing 2^nd Avenue blink red. They blink alternately in a rhythm that seems to get sloppier the closer you are to sleep. Once, on a weekend afternoon when I was about 13, I was helping my mom carry in groceries from the car. As I picked up a few bags out of the trunk, I suddenly felt that something was wrong. I turned around and faced the street, and there were no cars coming, not from any direction. I looked all the way up the street, all the way down the street, and was stunned. No cars. It scared me; I felt that it was impossible for there to be no one on my street, and that all the bad guys must be hiding where I can’t see them and they’re all just plotting out how they are going to attack me, holding groceries in my driveway at three o’clock on a Sunday. I went back inside and was so perturbed that I had to tell everyone about it. They all had the same reaction: “Huh! really?” I am the only one who has ever experienced that kind of isolation at our house.

Fortress with a Moat of Traffic by Melody Grewell

melody grewell

For my entire life, my family has only ever lived in one place. Our home is in Silver Spring, Maryland, at a very busy intersection. The house is about a half mile from the D.C. line, from the Silver Spring Metro station on the red line, and from the Capitol Beltway exits that everyone uses to get from the suburbs to the city. The house is like a fortress. It seems like you always see it, but can never get to it because of the moat of traffic whizzing by at 40 miles per hour.

Because of the location of our house, everyone who lives in the greater D.C. area knows exactly where we live when I describe it. It’s at the corner of 16^th Street and 2^nd Avenue, and the post holding the traffic lights is down in the front-left corner of our front yard. The house itself is a fifty year-old brick colonial with peeling white gables and ivy growing up the front wall. It’s built on a hill and we have seventeen steps and two landings going up to the front door, so it looks dauntingly large to passing traffic. Our driveway is very short and very steep, making it look like some sort of a ramp to go crashing through our side porch. And on top of that, to get in and out of the driveway, you have to either zip through or back into six lanes of traffic.

The house is in the bad part between two good neighborhoods, and our next-door neighbors have been robbed several times. But, in the thirty-some-odd years that my dad has owned our house, it has never been broken into. My dad attributes that fact to his cleverness in putting little stickers on our storm doors that say, “WARNING: ALARM SYSTEM.” But really, I think it’s because there’s nowhere to park. As if someone would hatch out a big plot to rob our house, park in our steep little driveway, climb all seventeen steps, and then see a business-card sized sticker and turn around and run away.

All my life, I have always felt safe in that house. Being from an urban area I assume that there is safety in numbers, and because there is traffic going by my house 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I feel like our house just can’t be touched. When I was little I used to have trouble sleeping (because my little sister who slept on the bottom bunk had a snoring problem), and I used to watch the cars go by and watch the traffic lights change as a way to confirm that everything was as it should be and comfort myself into falling back to sleep. The lights start blinking at midnight; the lights facing 16^th Street blink yellow, and the lights facing 2^nd Avenue blink red. They blink alternately in a rhythm that seems to get sloppier the closer you are to sleep.

Once, on a weekend afternoon when I was about 13, I was helping my mom carry in groceries from the car. As I picked up a few bags out of the trunk, I suddenly felt that something was wrong. I turned around and faced the street, and there were no cars coming, not from any direction. I looked all the way up the street, all the way down the street, and was stunned. No cars. It scared me; I felt that it was impossible for there to be no one on my street, and that all the bad guys must be hiding where I can’t see them and they’re all just plotting out how they are going to attack me, holding groceries in my driveway at three o’clock on a Sunday. I went back inside and was so perturbed that I had to tell everyone about it. They all had the same reaction: “Huh! really?” I am the only one who has ever experienced that kind of isolation at our house.