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To celebrate our son’s first birthday, we settle on a London theme. By this, I mean that I settle on a London theme and my husband knows better than to object. I sketch a three-tiered layer cake, just like they do on The Great British Baking Show; it will be light blue fondant with Union Jack pennants and a fleet of double decker busses. The pièce de résistance will be the cake topper: a miniature crown molded from gold fondant and bedecked with edible pearls. This, mind you, makes perfect sense because our son was born within twenty four hours of Kate Middleton’s third baby and I had always intended to marry Prince William and my husband and I were very into watching The Crown on Netflix during the rare nights that we didn’t immediately fall to sleep after putting our newborn to bed.

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“You have to try these,” I tell a fellow South Philly boy-mom who lives across the street.

“What are they?” she asks.

“Brownies!”

She’s skeptical. They don’t look like brownies, but that’s because they’re made entirely of dates, tahini, and cocoa powder. In my twenties, I made brownies with sugar and eggs and pumped them full of espresso powder to fuel the all-nighters that got me through grad school. But that was when I lived in London. That was when I could stay up to write as long as I wanted. That was before I had to wake up the next morning and be responsible for another human being.

“No sugar?” she asks.

“No sugar.” This is because now that I’m in my thirties and all-nighters are no longer possible, I’ve gotten into Vitamixing. First, smoothies. Then, baby food. Now, DIY almond milk and sugar-free approximations of the traditional brownie. “I’ve actually given up sugar,” I say. “And dairy too. And caffeine. And alcohol.”

“All at once?”

“Yes,” I inform her, basking in the glow of my moral superiority. “It’s my New Year’s resolution.”

“You’re going to murder someone,” she tells me. She is doing Dry January and suggests, ever so gently, to avoid triggering any homicidal tendencies on my part, that I should try eliminating one vice at a time. But I stand my ground. I will become vegan. I will lose weight. I will rearrange the furniture. I will reupholster the couch instead of working on my novel. I will renovate the kitchen. And I will bake our son the perfect birthday cake because it is through my cakes that I prove to the world–and to my child–that I am a good mother.

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My son’s grandmothers both devoted their lives to the education of small children: my mother-in-law as a Kindergarten teacher, and my mother as the sort of stay-at-home mom/Sunday-school teacher/Girl Scout troop leader/4-H chaperone who could whip up a brand new batch of homemade Play-Doh in approximately thirty seconds.

I am good at Play-Doh–the homemade kind is just art with flour–but I do not particularly care for small children. I do not tolerate messes well. I prefer to bestow my educational zeal on young adults. College students present their own problems, but they are, even in their excuses, endlessly fascinating. Babies, on the other hand, are boring.

I make sure to document every not-boring thing my son does during the first year of his life–Held his head up! Rolled over! Sat on his own! Stood up!–but these accomplishments amount to little more than defying gravity. There is nothing stimulating here, nothing approximating fulfillment in my book. And yet, a good mother does not admit such things.

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On paper, our son’s birthday cake will be the most beautiful cake in the world. On paper, I take pains to “enjoy every moment” of motherhood. On paper, our child is a little “bundle of joy.”

In reality, he comes to us blue, with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. After the NICU, he won’t latch properly. After the lactation consultant, he needs physical therapy. After the infant chiropractor, a tongue tie revision. When he finally sleeps, I hook up my breast pump and make my way back to Netflix, back to the Bake Off tent—as they call the show in the United Kingdom–where joy is manufactured and perfection is possible.

Physically speaking, Paul Hollywood is not my type. The fifty-nine-year-old co-host of The Great British Baking Show is short and stocky, with the puerile spiked hair of someone who refuses to acknowledge they’ve gone gray. But those bread-kneading biceps. Those baby-blue eyes. I loved a man with eyes like that when I moved to London for grad school. But again: that was before I got married. Before I had a child. Before I learned that life would occasionally require the outsourcing of my orgasms to bread-baking fantasies involving Paul Hollywood.

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When our son is three months old, I think I’m having a heart attack so I drive myself to the ER. The doctor tells me I’m fine; I’ve simply pulled a muscle while lifting our baby to nurse.

At four months, the pediatrician tells us we can “extinguish” the night feeds but I can’t stop crying when we move our son out of the co-sleeper and into his own room. My husband gives me noise canceling headphones, turns on my favorite sitcom, reminds me that our child is literally four feet away. But four feet might as well be his freshman year of college, so I burst into tears all over again.

My mother-in-law comes to visit. She bakes casseroles. She does laundry. She slips into the nursery to hold our son when he cries. We’re meant to be sleep training. I am not kind about this fumbling of our plans. I have to take myself out to the front porch to calm down. I have to take the dog around the block. When neither of these things works, I order books–more books–that promise to preserve my sanity and get my baby to sleep and solve my diastasis recti by magically knitting my abdominals back together.

At six months, an editor I met on a press trip commissions me to profile a famous choreographer for her magazine. My heart leaps. My mother offers to babysit. I take my laptop straight to the coffee shop, having already conducted the necessary research during nap time. The words come slowly because I am out of practice but I am alive again, if only for a few hours. So alive, in fact, that I stick my foot in my mouth when I tell my stay-at-home-mother how happy I am to finally be going back to “work.”

It takes me several years before I can ask my husband, “Do you think I had postpartum depression?”

“Of course,” he says. “I thought you knew?”

But I didn’t know. I just baked cakes.

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Between feeds, I teach myself how to make fondant with melted marshmallows and powdered sugar. I teach myself how to stack a three-tiered cake with wooden dowels and cardboard. At last, I decide to take my newly-acquired skills for a test drive. The result is not the elegant, three-tiered, astronomy-themed cake I had intended to make for my husband but more a deflated alien spaceship.

“It still tastes very good,” my husband tells me. “Don’t worry.”

I try not to cry.

“You’re right,” I tell him. “I’m being silly.” An alien space ship is at least astronomy-adjacent.

Still, I push the stroller to Home Depot. The internet tells me that masonry tools will get the frosted edges of my bakes nice and crisp. And a crisp edge with a 90-degree angle is what separates a good baker–a good mother–from a failure.

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Here, in pictures, I am good. Here, over the years, my child is hiking, camping, playing T-ball, building sandcastles with his cousins, sitting atop his father’s shoulders to set a star atop the Christmas tree. Here are finger paints and homemade Halloween costumes and culturally enriching activities like painting en plein air along the Schuylkill.

But sometimes I am not good. Sometimes I am just too tired for watercolors along the Schuylkill: the bikes, the snacks, the paints, the paintbrushes, the mason jar full of water to clean them, and the paper towels needed to dry them. Sometimes I just wish my son would be quiet so that I can write.

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The London cake is off to a much better start than the astronomy cake. But the crown I have sketched in my notebook refuses to materialize. Perhaps this is because I don’t want just any old crown. I want the crown from The Crown. But the crown from The Crown is made of gold. Mine is not. Mine collapses under its own weight.

It occurs to me that I could just top the cake with a candle in the shape of a number one from the Dollar Tree on Oregon Avenue, which is where I’ve bought the cake mix and all of the necessary frosting because I’m more concerned with how the cake looks than how it tastes. (Don’t tell Paul Hollywood.) But there is no artistry in this solution, no room for creativity.

Finally, inspiration strikes: I will top the cake with a fondant Paddington bear.

I very dutifully resisted the urge to spend £45 on a Paddington onesie at the Cath Kidston boutique the last time I was at Heathrow. Considering that I was seven months pregnant at the time and flying to attend the memorial service of my favorite professor, this took considerable restraint. But now, I shall reap my confectionary rewards.

I spend three days on Paddington, and for three days I am almost alive again: royal blue fondant for his coat; red for the hat; brown for his head and various appendages.

At the Michaels on Columbus Boulevard, I treat myself to an assortment of fondant tools. They look like something a dental hygienist might use: pokey things and pointy things and mirrored choppy things. One has a serrated triangle on the end and makes a perfect stitch-like effect on the edge of Paddington’s blue overcoat. Even though he ends up a bit lopsided and must be secured atop the cake with half a dozen toothpicks to keep him from plunging three stories to his death, my mother-in-law is astounded: You made that???

Yes. Yes, I did. I set the cake in the center of the dining room table, and the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents gather round. I am wearing the same preppy blue-and-white dress that I wore to my brother’s wedding and have dressed our son in a coordinating blue-and-white sailor suit. We manage to snap a few photos before he tosses off the matching hat. The stitch-like details on Paddington’s coat are so vivid that they even show up in the photos I post to Facebook, which I know because people have commented on them, and this confirms that I’m a good mother.

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But everything is not perfect. Only later would I learn that anthropologists have a term for the process of becoming a mother: matrescence. Nobody ever uses this term, not even that favorite professor, who was, in fact, both an anthropologist and a mother. When she learned of my pregnancy, her only advice was to keep working so that I could afford childcare, lest I lose my “potential.” Even as I type “matrescence,” Microsoft Word runs a furry red caterpillar–a very hungry caterpillar?–beneath the word, urging me to consider a correctly-spelled alternative. Is this because motherhood is meant to come naturally? Automatically? Does the process of becoming a mother–of determining the sort of mother you’re meant to be–not even deserve a name?

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At the end of the party, Paddington sits alone atop a small plate because no one actually likes to eat fondant, not even my two preteen nephews who usually eat anything.

“Where would you like me to put him?” my mother-in-law asks, cupping the bear like a sanctified communion wafer.

“You can just throw him out,” I tell her, switching the baby from one hip to the other.

“But you worked so hard!”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “What am I going to do with a fondant bear?”

She offers to take it home and put in her freezer.

“I can shellac it,” she says.

And for a moment, this actually seems like a good idea: Paddington from our son’s first birthday, then the trash truck from his second. We’ll have to switch to individual cake pops for his third, because of the pandemic, and then we’ll overcompensate with mason jar cakes and a fleet of rented quadricycles on Boathouse Row for his fourth, but for his fifth birthday, I’ll bake a mermaid-themed sandcastle cake, complete with a beach of brown sugar, ice cream cone turrets, and handmade chocolate seashells. My mother will be so impressed that she’ll call the neighbors to come see.

But is this the sort of woman I want to be? Channeling my creative impulses into birthday cakes when, beyond the highly choreographed fantasies of the Bake Off tent, beneath the socially acceptable performance of motherhood, I actually care so little for baking that I use a boxed mix from the dollar store?

Poor Paddington with his perfect stitching deserves a more dignified fate than that. So, too, does my son. So, too, does his mother, this woman that I have become. And so, on the afternoon of his first birthday, I put him down for his nap. I sneak into the kitchen. I take Paddington from his solitary throne in the freezer and I throw the fondant bear into the trash.

Then, I write. I write in fits and starts. I write in the margins. I write in between the cakes over the years. And by the time my son turns six, I don’t care about anything being Pinterest-perfect anymore because I’ve gotten myself into a fully funded MFA program for creative writing. An ice cream sundae bar, I decide, will do the trick and my therapist is very proud of me.

For his seventh birthday, halfway through my degree, my son decides he wants a pirate ship. We scroll Pinterest together.

“That one’s perfect!” he declares, zooming in on a veritable flotilla created entirely from fondant. But then my son–who is brilliant and kind and endlessly creative–remembers what I’ve taught him.

“Actually, nothing is perfect. But could we make a kraken out of fondant? Like, a really big one?”

“Absolutely,” I tell him. And together, we make a complete mess of the kitchen: clouds of confectioners’ sugar coating all of our appliances, melted marshmallows congealing in the microwave, food coloring- blue, green, inky purple- staining both the countertop and our fingertips. The color scheme is “ocean” so anything goes. And when my son wants to add another layer of white chocolate pirate skulls to the base, I tell him to go for it. “But save one for the crown,” I suggest, because even the deadliest of beasts deserves to feel fancy.

And this crown materializes: yellow fondant with seven spikes and a pirate skull in the middle. We mold seaweed from green fondant, ocean waves from Dollar Tree frosting, sea shells from sea salt caramel flavored candy melts. And when we top the cake with a perfectly imperfect eight-tentacled kraken, I don’t even bother to post a picture on Facebook. I’d rather share that I’ve just published my first short story, and it’s been nominated for a Pushcart.

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Kat Echevarría Richter is a fellow in the Creative Writing MFA program at Rutgers-Camden. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Glassworks, and Skirt and her essay “Becoming Boriqua” won first prize from LMNL Arts. Kat lives in South Philly with her partner, their child, and a neurotic but loveable rescue dog.

 

Yesterday, my younger brother arrived in Philadelphia and immediately asked if I would make my signature oxtail stew. It was a last-minute request, and normally I would have made my way to Reading Terminal Market, the bustling temple of food and humanity. I’ve been going there since childhood, clutching my mother’s and Aunt Lillian’s hands, learning from an early age that food is culture and archive.

But I didn’t have the energy for the trip downtown, not yesterday. Earlier in the day, I had treated myself to a date with the library. I wandered the cookbook section of the Parkway Central Branch, then sat and listened to Miles Davis in the music department, drifting through the quiet like a rambunctious prayer. That building, designed by Julian Abele, a Black architect whose genius shaped this city, has always been my sanctuary. As kids, my cousin Desi and I would ride our banana- and apple-seat bikes from Overbrook to the main branch, leave them unlocked outside, and disappear into research and imagination. We had branches closer to home, but that grand building called to us before we could articulate why. We always felt it was ours. More than fifty years later, stepping inside still feels like stepping into possibility.

So yes, the date was lovely and nourishing in its simplicity. And afterward? I was tired. The thought of diving into Reading Terminal’s whirl of tourists, produce vendors, fishmongers hollering orders, the smell of spices and hot oil and all that history, I simply couldn’t do it. My body said no, and I listened.

 

A friend suggested a nearby meat market that many of our Caribbean and African community members frequent. What I found was a small, unassuming Dominican market with fluorescent lights, narrow aisles of spices and produce, a radio blasting merengue, and a young cashier dancing between customers like joy was his second job.

And there, behind the meat counter, stood Mr. Shottie, the unexpected sovereign of this tiny, protein-rich kingdom. A youthful Jamaican elder with a Clarendon accent thick enough to stop you mid-sentence, he ruled that butcher station like a gentle chieftain. He was part comedian and part culinary philosopher, a food griot. As he talked me through the oxtails and offered preparation tips, he insisted I take a bottle of his personal sauce: Shottie’s Jamaican Sauce. He said it was a much-needed ingredient for oxtails. I found myself leaning in not just to hear him, but to hear inside him.

Because in that voice, in the music of it, there was history layered like sediment. The rolling brogue of long-ago Irish and Scottish tongues, carried through colonial overseers and prisoners transported against their will. Beneath that, pulsing, grounding, steady, were the rhythms of the Akan and Igbo, those ancestral beats that refused to disappear. A New World language, born of rupture and survival, dancing on top of a Dominican merengue track in a West Philly butcher shop.

It was enchanting. It was ordinary. It was a miracle disguised as a grocery errand.

There I stood, surrounded by plantains and Scotch bonnet peppers, by chicken feet arranged like delicate relics (yes, I bought them; collagen is my ally and my cane thanks me), realizing this was not just a shopping trip. It was a reminder that history is not behind us. It is right here, humming and swaying between metal shelves and glass coolers, still unfolding, still calling roll.

In that modest market, I felt the whole Atlantic world in motion, the diaspora speaking back to itself, seasoning memory, stirring pots, laughing, surviving, feeding each other forward.

Sometimes you don’t need a Reading Terminal to feel the world. Sometimes the world meets you at the butcher counter, smiling, accent thick with centuries, handing you a bottle of sauce and a lesson in who we are.

And my brother, tasting that stew infused with memory and migration, grinned wide and said, “This is it. Home, found in a bowl.”

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Octavia McBride-Ahebee is a Philadelphia-based poet, writer, and educator whose work centers migration, Black Atlantic history, memory, and place. A longtime teaching artist and community collaborator, she has contributed to multiple anthologies and cultural projects connecting Philadelphia to West Africa and the broader African diaspora. Her work often bridges literature, visual art, and public history, with a focus on overlooked narratives and intergenerational storytelling. She is currently engaged in several writing and arts initiatives rooted in community and social justice.

 

I disliked Ruby from the moment I met her.  It was my first day as the administrative assistant at a brand-new company, and she could not be bothered with the new girl.  To be fair, in the accounting department it was the busiest time of the month, and she was clearly frazzled with all of the billing that needed to go out the door.  I told myself to give her a chance, but as the weeks went by it became clear that she was brusque and abrasive, and she had this way of talking to me that made me feel like she was ordering me around.  And so, our feud began.

For the first few months, we largely ignored each other when we passed in the hallway or the lunchroom, but then the day came when my company promoted me to an accounting clerk position.  I was elated until I discovered that my trainer would be none other than Ruby, and my figurative balloon of excitement popped and fell in sad little pieces to the floor of my cubicle.  The friends I had made around the office told me to simply ignore her attitude, but that’s easier said than done when you are spending hours on end together.

“Accounting always has to work on weekends during month-end.  That’s just the way it is,” she told me one Friday afternoon as I prepared to leave.  “I’ll see you tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. and we’ll get all of the billing done.”

“How long will that take?  I have plans tomorrow night.”  I didn’t tell her that I had a date with a cute guy from the office, and that there was exactly 0% chance that I was staying past 4:00 p.m.

“I don’t know, Ashleigh.  We work until it’s done,” she huffed before shutting her office door in my face.

So, I showed up bright and early on Saturday morning, and worked… and worked… and worked.  The billing was definitely not finished when I knocked on Ruby’s door at 4:00 p.m. sharp to tell her I was leaving, but I didn’t care.  I was 23 years old and not ready to work my entire Saturday away, especially not to help someone who had sprung it on me the very afternoon before.  Of course, this didn’t sit well with Ruby and she told me as much.

“That’s really disappointing, Ashleigh.” (That condescending tone, ugh.)  “I thought I could count on you to get the work done.  I guess I’ll just stay all night finishing it, so show me where you left off.”

“Everything is on my desk, you’ll figure it out,” I said flippantly and walked out the front door.  Later that evening, though, I started to worry.  What if she told our boss that I had shirked my duties?  What if she claimed that I’m a liability to the accounting department, and that I should be fired?  My first real job, and this woman would ruin it all, or so I was convinced by the time I walked into the office on Monday morning.

Turns out that she did figure it out and got all of the billing done.  It also turns out that she did not, in fact, tattle on me to our boss.  I was shocked, and I felt this little piece of melted ice fall from the iceberg that was my dislike for Ruby.  Sure, around the office, we still called her “Rude-y” or “Moody Ruby” among ourselves when she was on a rampage about something, but I also begrudgingly began to respect her.  She had a strong work ethic that I could only hope to emulate.  She was very intelligent, and a great problem solver.  Most of all, on the few occasions that her stony façade cracked, she had an infectious laugh.  Maybe I didn’t dislike her quite as much as I had originally thought.

My work situation soon changed, however, because I was promoted again to a financial analyst position with the opportunity to work from our Center City office.  I couldn’t believe my luck!  It seemed like a dream to take the train into the big city every day and have my very own cubicle on the 22nd floor of 1650 Arch with expansive windows that looked out toward One and Two Liberty Place.  I began to take walks every day at lunch, exploring the neighborhoods around my office.  I wandered east on JFK Boulevard to City Hall, then back west to 30th Street Station.  Some days I walked northwest toward the Franklin Institute and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but other days I chose a southerly direction toward the leafy haven of Rittenhouse Square.  The city was mine to discover, and I soaked in my lunchtime explorations like sunshine.

As my love for Philadelphia bloomed, so did my obsession with photography.  I adored the city’s architecture and started taking pictures here and there of interesting buildings, trees, and streets I saw on my daily walks, posting my favorite shots to my Instagram.  Roaming one day around Fitler Square, I found myself face-to-face with a lime-green house and its cherry-red door.  It was so visually pleasing that I immediately raised my phone camera and snapped a picture.  The next street over revealed a lemon-yellow door within a pale gray brick façade, and the following street showcased the most cheerful and ornate Kelly-green door adorned with a shamrock wreath.  My mission on my afternoon walks became finding new and interesting doors.  They were the hidden treasures to be found past the hustle and bustle of Center City with its towering skyscrapers and streets teeming with people dodging steam rising from sewer grates.  My solitary photography walks were the best part of my work days.

The old saying goes that absence makes the heart grow fonder.  True to that phrase, the less I saw Ruby, the more we talked.  We remotely collaborated on work tasks more often, and we did so in an increasingly friendly manner.  My respect for Ruby continued to grow, and I could sense that her respect for me was also blooming as I matured in both my personal outlook and my accounting role.  Then, a year after my move to Philadelphia, our company announced that our offices were merging, and that we would all be working from the Center City office.  On the day of the move, I helped Ruby settle into her cubicle right down the hall from my own.  Ruby had been staunchly against working in the city, turning her nose up at the idea and voicing her displeasure at every opportunity, but as she marveled at our shared view, I had a hard-to-explain feeling.  I sensed that she was masking her fear of the city with haughtiness so as not to show her vulnerability. It was that realization that gave me an idea.

“Hey Ruby, why don’t we take a walk and go grab some lunch?” I asked her.  After a moment of hesitation, she agreed.  We set off into the bright sunshine and strolled over to the food court at One Liberty Place.  Sneaking a peek at Ruby through my sunglasses, I could tell by the way she tilted her head back to look at the skyscrapers that she was impressed by the architecture.  By the time we had eaten and worked our way back to the office, Ruby seemed happier about being out and about in Philly.  The next day, when I asked if she’d like to go for a walk at lunch, she almost jumped out of her chair and excitedly exclaimed, “Yes, count me in!”

This lunch walk, I decided, would be different – I wanted to show Ruby more of the city that I had fallen in love with over the past year and a half.  On this day, I guided her to Rittenhouse Square.  There was a bustling outdoor art market being held in the park, and we wandered from stall to stall, stopping here and there to admire the miniature watercolors depicting Boathouse Row and the canvas photography prints of the skyline looking across the Delaware River from the Camden Waterfront.  I bought an etching of a bluebird; Ruby bought some greeting cards to send to her family.  They lived in New England, and Ruby confessed that she missed them dearly and sometimes considered moving home to be near them.  Another crack in her tough façade had appeared, and I felt awful that she must be lonely without her family nearby.  My family had always been close – what would it be like to be far from them?  What kind of person might I be without the steadying presence of my loved ones?  Hearing Ruby’s situation gave me a deepened understanding of her outward behavior.

As the months went on, our lunchtime walks became daily happenings.  I still loved finding beautiful new doors and revisiting my favorite ones.  As the city prepared for Halloween and then Christmas, festive seasonal decor began to appear on many doors, much to my joy.  Ruby, on the other hand, favored windows.  She saw these as eyes to the people living in the houses behind them, and she especially delighted in seeing house cats perched on inner windowsills, basking in a sunbeam or playing with a curtain.  I showed Ruby my Instagram profile full of my door pictures; she promptly set up her own Instagram and began posting her lovely window shots.  Our walks were the highlight of my day, as it was so nice to share my thoughts, ideas, memories, and hopes with Ruby, and to hear hers.  Some days, we just wandered in silence.  The only sounds were the occasional “Oh look over there” or “Let’s walk down this little street,” the birds chirping in the trees, the far-off honk of car horns, and the crunch of our footsteps on concrete, leaves, or snow.

Ruby and I began to meet up in Philadelphia on weekends.  We took the ancient elevator up to the observation deck under William Penn’s statue at City Hall and reveled in the view.  We sneaked up to the conference area on the 33rd floor of the Loews Hotel and were equally entranced by that vantage point.  I watched Ruby fall in love with the city much as I had the year before, and by spending this time together I discovered that she wasn’t the brash, mean person I thought she was when I first met her.  She was a kind, thoughtful, smart, funny, wonderful human.  I just had to gain her trust to see the soul inside.

A few years after Ruby’s move to the city office, our company announced they were moving all accounting operations to Houston and offered to pay for each employee’s relocation.  Ruby took the offer; I found a new job in the area.  I couldn’t leave my family or the city I loved so much, but Ruby was ready for a new adventure.  On our last day in the office together, Ruby helped me pack up my things and then we embarked on one last walk.  We found ourselves in the sanctuary of the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul.  Neither Ruby nor I are particularly religious people, but we sat quietly together in a pew admiring the grandeur.  Ruby, of course, found the stained-glass windows fascinating, while I was in awe of the ornate front doors.  In that moment I realized that, despite our differences, being able to bond over the city we had both come to adore was what had created a lasting friendship.

It’s been eight years since I last saw Ruby.  She did indeed move to Texas and remains there to this day.  I, meanwhile, met my now-husband and moved to Wilmington, Delaware.  Ruby and I mostly keep in touch over social media.  I miss her and wish we spoke more often.  I hope in the future we can reconnect in person, but whenever I post a new door picture on Instagram, I think of my special friend and those golden days we shared in the City of Brotherly Love, and without fail, I smile.

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Ashleigh McAneny is an emerging writer and photography enthusiast whose works have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Stonecrop Magazine, and Reader’s Digest.  She particularly enjoys writing creative nonfiction and fiction, and photographing colorful doors.  Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Ashleigh earned a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies from Villanova University.  She now resides in Wilmington, Delaware with her husband and their dog.  You can find her @ashleigh_erin on Instagram.

 

Antonio and I arrived in Philadelphia on August 5, 2014. I’d driven the entire two-day trip from Georgia because he didn’t have a US driver’s license yet, and I was worried if he got pulled over the consequences might be death or deportation. Me, on the other hand, they’d probably just wave on. We made the trip in a new Toyota Prius, which I bought from a salesman who had been reluctant to sell me a car over the phone. “But don’t you want to come by and see it?” he’d asked.

“I live in Oaxaca,” I said, trying to explain my situation.

“Oaxaca. Where’s that?” he interrupted.

“In Mexico…it’s, I just don’t have time to go back to Georgia just to buy a car,” I finished.

“Well, do you know which car you want?” he asked.

No negotiating. I’d already viewed every Prius for sale on Toyota’s website, and I knew which one was the cheapest. “The Prius Hybrid, the silver one because it’s $5,000 less than the others.”

“All righty, how’d you like to make the down payment?”

I read the salesman my credit card number over the phone. For the next few months, I gave no more thought to it until I needed to drive it off the lot. Instead, I focused on Antonio’s US residency paperwork and finding a place to live.

In our new apartment, also rented sight unseen, we plopped down our four duffel bags, our only worldly possessions, and looked around. It wasn’t the first time in my 34 years I’d start over from nothing, but I hoped it’d be the last. We’d ended up there because the owner was the only landlord who’d rent to us without having me sign the lease in person. Of the twenty or so others I called, only he understood the logistical constraints of our situation. The others thought I’d crafted an ingenious scam by transferring an entire month’s deposit and the first and last month’s rent into their bank account.

In anticipation of our arrival, I’d ordered a mattress online, but we’d missed its delivery. As we scurried across town in our Prius, Antonio asked how we could possibly pick it up in such a small car—living in Mexico had caused us to miss the foam mattress revolution. Back in the apartment, after releasing this squishy item from its packaging, in hopes it would become a mattress, we headed to Walmart. Filling two carts with sheets, pillows, toilet paper, a frying pan, and a spatula—life’s essential items—the total rang into the hundreds of dollars. I gulped, counting the days until my first paycheck arrived. Unfortunately, the cashier made an error and could not check us out. Oddly frustrated with us for buying too much stuff, she made us move everything to a different register and wait as she hastily rescanned every item. Exhausted, I rolled my eyes at Antonio and gave a grimaced grin to the cashier to avoid another “error.”

Until I moved to Philadelphia, I never understood how a TV show could be made about parking, only parking. That evening, standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment, staring at the numerous street signs, I tried to make sense of the parking rules. Now, I can identify non-Philadelphians by how long they stand on the sidewalk staring up at a parking sign. Between Googling and staring, I concluded that we’d need a residential parking pass to leave our car indefinitely on the street in front of the house, which could only be attained in person at the Philadelphia Parking Authority or what all Philadelphians call the PPA.

“You can’t get a residential parking pass for a car plated in Georgia. You’ll need new Pennsylvania plates,” the woman behind plexiglass window #4 explained.

While my heart sank into a dark place, I held close to my carefully copied lease and insurance card, which had taken me over an hour to print that morning. “Okay, how can I do that?” I answered with a high voice, raised eyebrows, and no sudden movements.

“At PennDOT or one of their licensed agents,” she said just before yelling, “Next!” to the person behind me.

I nodded and left, wounded but not defeated, wondering if PennDOT was the equivalent of the DMV. Using the bad Comcast free internet at our apartment, I realized I’d also need a Pennsylvania driver’s license before transferring the title to Pennsylvania.

My wherewithal for dealing with government agencies waned. I was still traumatized by my interactions with the USCIS for Antonio’s temporary residency, which had included an across-the-country trip to Ciudad Juárez, thousands of dollars in application fees, and hours of translating our private Facebook messages from Spanish to English by hand to prove the authenticity of our relationship. Everyone told me it’d take years to get his residency. Hire a lawyer, someone had said, it’s probably only $5,000. Nearly all the money we had. I did the paperwork myself. I pored over every entry about Mexicans applying for US residency on visajourney.com. I repeatedly read the form instructions on the USCIS website to ensure I didn’t miss something and cause us to be separated by national borders. Less than a year later, Antonio’s immigrant entrance package arrived at Oaxaca’s DHL office with DO NOT OPEN printed outside. We were to carry it to the airport to show he had permission to board the plane. After landing in Atlanta, we’d hand it to the immigration officer, allowing Antonio legal entry into the United States of America.

 

For the next week, trying to jump through the tag, license, and parking pass hoops in the Philadelphia Blackhole of Parking, Antonio and I took turns moving the car every two hours, perpendicular to the prior parking space, all around the neighborhood. At first, we stayed up until midnight, when the metered parking ended, and woke at 7:00 AM, when the metered parking began, to do our last and first park of the day. Then, we figured out that if you parked at 10:00 PM, your two hours ran out at midnight, and the unmetered parking began, and if you were parked in a metered spot at 7:00 AM, then your two hours also began, giving you until 9:00 AM. All of this was confounded by our inability to parallel park. I grew up in the country and Antonio grew up without a car, so we’d never needed or desired to learn this life skill.

Several years before moving to Philadelphia, when Antonio and I were dating and I was living in Georgia, I visited him in Villahermosa, Tabasco, where he was an architect on an airport redesign contract. When I arrived, he drove me to his domicile—the word I’ll use for it—a concrete room with glassless windows, a curtain for a bathroom door, and an inflatable mattress, which no longer inflated, for a bed. “I’m not sleeping here,” I said, and we headed for the cheapest hotel in the city.

One afternoon during that first week in Philly, Antonio said he was giving up and would just move back to Mexico because it was easier to survive there than find parking in Philadelphia. I somewhat agreed. But I couldn’t leave. I had nowhere else to go. Nearly all my money had been put into the apartment. And my job at Rowan University started in three weeks, our only source of income. Besides, I never give up easily and wasn’t about to let the PPA take me down. We had to try and make it. And if he left the US now, he’d be abandoning his temporary US residency. In a way, the day we got our residential parking pass saved our marriage.

 

Over the next two weeks, we’d get a kitchen table from Ikea, a TV from Best Buy, and a yellow dresser from a guy with a broken leg selling antiques on Craigslist. All items that somehow we—which really means Antonio—got into the trunk of the Prius. But I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a couch. Somehow, somewhere between Oaxaca and Philadelphia, my heart had set itself on a purple couch. It’s ridiculous. Who buys a car without having driven it? And rents an apartment without having seen it? But won’t accept anything but the perfect purple couch?

Me.

The only time I’d ever bought a new couch in my adult life was when I moved to Oaxaca, and it had been big, fluffy, and a lovely burnt orange color. I hated selling it when we moved to the States. All the other couches in my adulthood had been hand-me-downs from recently deceased relatives, smelling of mothballs, or cheap finds on Craigslist, smelling of the unidentifiable. The heart wants what the heart wants, and mine wanted a new purple couch. On my laptop, trying a variety of synonyms for purple – lavender, violet, and plum, weeks passed as I searched the internet for the perfect couch. The results were either out of my price range or looked like they belonged in an ornate palace, so I resorted to foraging the nearby furniture stores.

Meanwhile, Antonio, the Mexican MacGyver, constructed a couch-like object from the box the foam mattress had come in. He saves everything, always telling me that what I perceive as garbage is still useful. But even Antonio, the man who can sleep anywhere, tired of sitting on our make-shift furniture and insisted I choose a couch or he would pick one out himself. After another unsuccessful trip to Ikea, we decided to check out the furniture store next door, Raymour & Flanigan. Greeted immediately in Spanish by the salesman, who I later found out was Puerto Rican, he painstakingly showed us nearly every couch in the warehouse and offered a financing option of 0% interest for 12 months. We tried to translate “ottoman” to Spanish, thinking the online translator’s suggestion of “otomano” just couldn’t be right. After looking for more than an hour at couches that were not any shade of purple, I thought all hope was lost as we headed to the exit. Our new salesman hung his head, and I, feeling guilty for not buying anything, confessed my heart’s desire, “It’s just…es solo que…quiero un sofá morado.”

“A purple one?” he replied, “Come with me.”

Slinking between all the living room setups, we arrived at a little room on the side of the warehouse. “Like this one?” he asked, “It’s the last one we have.”

A velvety, dark purple, there was my couch, as if it had been waiting for me. A dozen signatures later, my purple couch would be delivered in just a few days. Thinking back, my irrational desire to only accept the perfect purple couch seemed to be a small refusal to accept whatever life would give me. It was my way of exerting a little agency upon a world that wouldn’t let me park my car.

 

Parking would never be easy in Philly. Over the next couple of years, the PPA towed my car numerous times, once from right outside my door. Gazing up and down our sidewalk, the street was empty of cars as far as I could see. An oddity in Philadelphia, I thought the rapture had happened, and everyone had taken their cars with them. Knowing there was no way God would have left me behind, I called the PPA, again. They’d towed it, they said, and it should be within a five-block radius of where it was initially parked. Antonio took one key, I took the other, and we started in different directions. Holding the keys over our heads and as far into the street as possible, we walked our neighborhood, repeatedly clicking the lock/unlock button and listening for our car’s beeped response.

 

Two years later, when I was nearly eight months pregnant, we’d bought a rowhome in East Passyunk. In the smallest U-Haul available, we moved our purple couch and the few other things we had accumulated, less than three miles across the city, to our new home, just a little bit bigger than our apartment. Antonio removed the front door to get the purple couch into the house. Then he couldn’t get the door back onto the frame without more tools, so that night, we pushed our purple couch up against the front door to hold it in place to protect us from the outside world. As my belly expanded beyond what I thought humanly possible, I could no longer sleep on our mattress, so the purple couch became my bed. Propped up with nearly every pillow in the house, I’d tuck a heating pad under my back each night, hoping for relief from painful sciatica burning down my legs.

 

As I write, people walk north toward the United States. They, too, carry all they have with them. A few might find a new home in a place they’ve never seen before. Their experience isn’t a new one, and neither is ours. Humans have been moving for as long as there have been humans, even before we were humans. Sometimes we move because we want to. Sometimes because we have to. And it’s always been hard. I count ourselves lucky, blessed, and privileged to have found some parking, a purple couch, and a home in Philadelphia. I wish the same for everyone, everywhere.

 

Our baby turns seven soon. He loves to sit in Dickinson Square Park, eating chocolate ice cream with sprinkles in a cone that he got from the laundromat, which, I swear, is the best chocolate ice cream in the city. Turns out that August 5, 2014, would be the last time we’d arrive at a home without having seen it with almost no material possessions to our name. When we bought our home in East Passyunk, I told the real estate agent we didn’t have enough stuff to fill a basement. Now it’s full of toys my son won’t let me give away, mismatched tools Antonio refuses to organize, and the mattress we picked up in a Prius. We upgraded the car to a RAV4, another funny story, and my son cried as the new owner drove our Prius away. Despite the residential parking pass, we still join the war of Philadelphia parking after 5:00 PM.

Nearly ten years have passed since that August day we arrived in Philadelphia, and the arms of my purple couch are worn and turning a light lavender. I wonder how long I’ll wait to replace it. Will it have to be purple again? My heart doesn’t yet know. But I did just Google purple couch — and I don’t like any of them.

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Stephanie Abraham is a professor of education at Rowan University who dreams of growing up to be a creative nonfiction writer. She writes about her childhood in Georgia, working as an elementary school teacher, learning Spanish as an adult, falling in love in Mexico, and finally finding a home and starting a family in Philadelphia. She’s published in various academic outlets. Still, most proudly, her writing has found a home in The AutoEthnographer: A Literacy & Arts Magazine, Five Minutes, and The Font: A Literary Journal for Language Teachers.