APS for Jenna

"Object Lessons" (39)
"This was not ordinary nature loving. I was not really a nature lover anyway. I resisted walks in Hyde Park whenever I could, and I was restless when we went out at school, paired off in the dreaded "crocodile", to pick up polished chestnuts or gather acorns. This was different. Not a season but a place. Not an observant affection but a thwarted possessiveness: a rare and virulent homesickness."

"A Walker in the City" (7, 12)
"Everything seems so small here now, old, mashed-in, more rundown even than I remember it, but with a heartbreaking familiarity at each door that makes me wonder if I can take in anything new, so strongly do I feel in Brownsville that I am walking in my sleep."

"So that when poor Jews left, even Negroes, as we said, found it easy to settle on the margins of Brownsville, and with the coming of spring, bands of Gypsies, who would rent empty stores, hang their rugs around them like a desert tent, and bring a dusty and faintly sinister air of carnival into our neighborhood."