Border Patrol

BY LORRY STILLMAN

Thereis afamiliarfeel and smell to the neighborhoods of Portland that calls me back to my child-

hood. e sway of the trees on Longfellow Street that shadowed my walk one short block to Portland Hebrew Day School; the crunch of fallen acorns under my feet; the skating pond on Devonshire Street where we sipped scalding hot chocolate from a slim thermos and captured spring polliwogs in great metal pails, hoping to see them sprout their legs; the smell of the early lavender on the fringe of Back Cove that became the rst spring bouquets I brought my mother; the shadow of the former Porteous, Mitchell and Braun building where I climbed the gilt-edged marble stairs in search of lacy handkerchiefs; the elevator of the Libby building with a tiny, uniformed man who wore white gloves to operate the spinning wheel that li ed me to my piano lesson in the h- oor garret.

I o en wandered alone, cradled in the recognition of a familiar doorstep or the call of the rehouse horns at noon on Sundays. is was my city, where I was born and raised—a place where I never met anyone who wasn’t local. My family, friends, and teachers knew the safety of deep roots too, and as natives we con dently claimed the landscape and traditions. e borders of my wanderings expanded walking with my mother and grandparents along the cobblestones of India Street— in the 1960s, the meeting place for Portland’s ethnic communities. Italian specialty shops sold the thickened ricotta cheeses and cured meats that graced the tables of lower Congress Street. Church steeples rose above the city skyline, and the stained-glass windows of the synagogues lit the paths between the stores. e signs were in Yiddish, the lost language of my family, and in English, the language that ushered us into this new world. e same smells of abandoned towns in Eastern Europe wa ed through the morning air as my Bubbie and others of her generation viscerally recognized the feel of the same cobblestone that shaped the streets of the old country through the soles of their shoes. is was the day my mother tucked last week's brown paper bags in the back seat with me and my older siblings as we journeyed from the diaspora of the new Woodfords Corner neighborhood back into the Old World at the base of the Eastern Promenade, reenacting the horse carts traveling from the side streets of the shtetl into a hub of safe commerce among our people. Each Sunday I stood before the glass cases of the bakery with my face pressed into my mother’s coat. e air was fogged with the steam of hot, sugar-encrusted kichel and golden loaves of challah. e bakery line was the place to exchange reviews of the Saturday sermons delivered by the rabbis in Portland’s temples and synagogues. Measured approval, requisite critiques, hushed gossip, and celebratory Mazel tovs! echoed in the small store. As we moved closer to the counter, I could see Mrs. Rice enter from the back of the bakery. She was a graying, buxom blond whose apron was coated with jam from lled cookies. Her large breasts acted as a shelf for the tray of pastries she carried, and I shrank from her critical gaze. I do not remember her ever smiling.

My mother was a master baker in our Jewish community. Other mothers, not as adept at baking the traditional holiday pas-

This was my city.