DC By the Book

Excerpt: Our Washington, DC house is a city house. It has a little white porch with a swing big enough for two people and a pig-shaped weather vane on the roof and no garage because when you live in the city you can walk to a lot of places and take the subway which is called the Metro.

Excerpt: My grandparents live three blocks away from me in a three-story-tall house that my grandfather has lived in since he was born which was an extremely long time ago. It has NINE porches, some of them on the second floor that you can only get on if you climb out of the window which is something I get to do because my grandmother is on a campaign against pigeons and she sends me out to stomp around and scare them away.

Excerpt: Another good thing about this neighborhood is that it has sidewalks and you can walk to the Capitol of the United States of America which is the biggest, fanciest building ever. You can walk to the Supreme Court which has an extremely lot of steps and you can walk to Grubb’s Drugstore and buy Twizzlers and talk to Eddie the pharmacist which I like to do because every time he sees me he says, “What’s shakin’, Lucy Rose?”

Excerpt: We rode the Red Line to the Doll’s House Museum. The best thing I saw was a cake that was as small as a penny. It wasn’t real. On the way home we got off at the Mall which is not the shopping kind of mall but a big park near the Washington Monument. There is a merry-go-round and I got to ride on it and my dad took my picture on a pink horse and when I got off the ticket-taking man used my dad’s camera and took a picture of both of us together and I made my movie star smile that shows almost all of my teeth and once and the ticket guy said to my dad, “she’s the spitting image of you,” which I thought was rude because I am no spitter.

Excerpt: We walked down Fourth Street, past Mrs. Greeley’s house which has a SOLD sign in the front yard and past an old, used-up Christmas tree someone put out for the trash and then we turned on Madam and Pop’s street which is Constitution Avenue and my mom kept saying we should stop on it and I should eat my bagel.