31st Street

The street where I was born.

I spent the first six months of my life on this street, as well as a heckuva a lot of days after school and many weekends. (A few months after I was born, we moved to Radcliffe Street on the west side of Detroit.)

Grandpa and Grandma Mrozowski lived on 31st Street in a giant, three-family home. And while the 31st is now mostly a series of burnt-out houses, vacant lots and weeds, I remember it as a beautiful tree-lined street. And my grandfather had the biggest garden you have ever seen. In fact, I don't think he had any back lawn. My dad just called it a vineyard, and I guess it was -- a vineyard in the middle of Detroit.

Basically, the entire backyard was turned into a garden filled with raspberries, cukes, tomatoes (of every different kind), black currants, dill, red currants and grape vines. There were also cherry and plum trees. When I was a kid, I don't think we ate store-bought fruit all summer.

Most of the family lived in one of the sections in the house on 31st at one time or another -- including us. It was the stuff of true immigrant family life.

Anyway, while the surrounding streets were apparently turning more and more crime-ridden, that house to me was a haven filled with white butter and jelly sandwiches, yellow tomatoes, liverwurst sandwiches, home-canned pickles and all types of pierogis. Happy polkas or Elvis often wafted through sun-filled rooms. Busy half-Polish half-English discussions were a constant, all seeming very important to a wee little girl munching on her strawberry wafer cookies or drinking homemade rhurbarb juice.

I loved going to the house on 31st because it was ever a bustling place. My grandma always had something cooking on the stove, (I dinstinctly remember a cow's brain in a pot. Yipes!) and my grandpa always had a ladder up somewhere. He was the ultimate handyman, and I think I got my love of gardening and tinkering from him. (By the way, don't try to tell me I can't fix a toilet or anything else. It's in my genes, people.)

I used to love sitting on my grandpa's lap and making tall horns out the remaining hair he had on his head. And he loved to take us down into his basement and show us all the different kinds of vegetables he canned or how he was repairing some appliance that anyone else would've thrown away. And it was so much fun to go grocery shopping with him, even though I seem to recall that either he and/or my grandma were crazy drivers. And I couldn't believe some of the things they bought (and I would eat). I remember a delicious cow's tongue that I later tried again in France as a delicacy. (I confess I never tried pigs feet. I actually now regret that.)

But that was the life in a Polish household in Detroit in the 70s and 80s.

And those are some of the absolutely wonderful memories I have of 31st. They are only slightly clouded by brief pictures of my grandpa repainting his corner garage over and over when it was repeatedly painted with graffiti... or incidents of crime I try to block out. Somehow, I don't even remember when my grandparents moved a few miles down to another street in Detroit that was a little safer.

No, I have mostly extremely happy memories of that house and that street.