DC By the Book

Excerpt: You're supposed to say a gaggle of geese when there are a bunch of geese running all over the road like they do up by Howard University and the reservoir. Haven't you seen the sign on Fourth Street telling you that geese are crossing? If you haven't seen them walking up out of the water and trying to go to college at Howard, then you just need to go on up there and look at them.

Excerpt: Today they call our lily ponds the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, and the National Park Service set up a gate there on Anacostia Avenue, but there was a time when I could lie on the grass near the front of our house and roll down the hill laughing and catch myself just before I splashed into one of the ponds. I used to roam around there with my dog, Prince, walking between the catalpa trees and the bamboo and the cherry trees.

Excerpt: Back in 1931, my Kenilworth neighborhood was so countrified - can you believe it? - we had a real farm right inside the city of Washington. Today the old property is bottle in with new houses, although a brown stream still runs through in the back. But let me tell you, we used to have the best corn and tomatoes and string beans.

Excerpt: If you do go, be sure you stand on the Washington Hospital Center side were it's safe, right in front of Children's Hospital. If you look, you'll see a gaggle of Canada geese swimming around and eating Howard University grass and stopping all the traffic on Michigan Avenue when folks are trying to get downtown on the weekend.

Excerpt: Inside the store I buy a great big brown bag full of the sweetest, fullest, roundest, almost-red-but-with-bright-yellow-streaks apples, the true-coolest-apples, the most tingle-your-nose, calling-you-by-name kind of apples ever known to appear under Mr. Benson's green and orange District Grocery Store sign at Kenilworth Avenue and Douglas Street.