Friday, August 1, 2025 (Lammas/Midsummer); from Jinny in San Diego, CA to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
A number of milestones during the past three months—oldest grandchild Parker graduated from high school; youngest grandchild Kenley turned three. Quite an age range, though not nearly as great as the twenty-nine year span among our great-grandmothers that I wrote about at May Day.
Around the time of Kenley’s birthday, we got to spend a weekend with her and her parents in the Cleveland area, after spending a couple of midweek days there with one of Jim’s long-term friends Rick and wife Karla in their new-to-them place in University Heights. Getting to Cleveland was somewhat easier for us than getting to Scott’s small town would have been, so we’d arranged a vacation rental in the Cleveland area. Our friend Rick had lived in Cleveland earlier in his life. In retirement, he’d returned to his roots to be near a brother as they both aged. Rick gave us some of his time for just hanging out, along with brief tours of parts of Shaker Heights.
A couple of days later, when Scott, Morgan, and Kenley arrived, we switched gears toward the younger end of the age spectrum. After too much sogginess in our original venue, we moved to a chain motel with an indoor swimming pool, a big hit with Kenley. Scott was able to find bathing suits and water wings somewhere on short notice. When the skies paused in their dripping, we took a brief side excursion to Chagrin Falls, named for an early settler, not the emotional state. The falls were at their roaring best due to the recent rains.
In addition to the May trip that Jim and I took to Ohio as a couple, I did a solo June trip to Maryland, mostly to attend a nationwide gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Baltimore. Brother Bruce and sister-in-law Wendy graciously hosted me at night. On the several mornings I attended UU sessions, Wendy took me to the nearest commuter rail station, where I could catch a train that would deposit me just across the street from the convention center where the UUs were meeting. The weather was steamy, not especially unusual in Baltimore in late June, so the chance to ride in air-conditioned cars and trains was most welcome.
I spent a little “break time” during convention days revisiting old haunts from the couple of years when Jim and I had lived in Baltimore City as newlyweds. Though I never made it to the row house near the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus where Jim and I had rented our first apartment as “married folks,” I did see the three story stone building on West Monument Avenue where we rented during our second Baltimore year. It looked very much the same as I remembered it, at least on the outside. The area around it was mixed.
What we Voris kids had experienced during our 1950’s childhoods as a vibrant downtown Baltimore commercial corridor along Howard Street had long since disappeared. The former Hochshild/Hutzler/Stewart’s department store area is mostly derelict. From what I could tell in a brief walk around, central Baltimore is now a checkerboard mixture of development, gentrification and decay. Large-scale redevelopment efforts like the convention center and the inner harbor sit cheek by jowl with areas that I would be hesitant to walk through after dark. I was a little nervous walking some places even during the day—a light rail line gave me the option of making most of my jaunts in a somewhat less exposed way.
Not far from the convention center, I discovered the current iteration of the Lord Baltimore Hotel. According to family lore when I was growing up, Granny’s job as housekeeping supervisor there during part of the 1930’s helped keep the Pressley family financially afloat through the worst of the Depression. Efforts have been made to resurrect Lexington Market, where Granny had taken me as a child on Greyhound bus trips between Elkridge and downtown Baltimore. Periodically, Granny would make a trek to Lexington Market to get some of the delectables she could not find in the grocery stores nearer Elkridge where Mom usually drove her to go shopping. (Granny never learned to drive.) This trip, I had lunch at one of the market stalls during a recess from UUism.
I also spent time looking through archives at the nearby Maryland Historical Society. The venue brought back memories of Mom and her late-life researches into the history of Elkridge. A helpful volunteer found some clippings for me about the Dobbin sisters of Lawyers Hill, prior owners of the “Wayside” property that Mom and Dad bought from the Dobbin estate in 1957 or early 1958. One clipping was the obituary of Rebecca Dobbin, who’d died in September, 1953. According to the obituary: “[Miss Dobbin] was noted for her weather vanes usually made from automobile steel in the forms of roosters, fish, wild animals, horses, or sailboats. One topped the clubhouse at Pimlico [horse racing track].” I could almost imagine the three spinster Dobbin sisters plying their various crafts in the two small outbuildings on the property. I’m pretty sure there were still some weathervanes in the “studio” when Mom and Dad started cleaning it out.
I wish we had been able to link up in Taneytown, and am sorry to have missed you yet again. I’ve spent much of the rest of the summer either at our small yard (watering the fruit trees and the flowers in hanging pots, tending a few tomatoes in the raised bed), or at the giving garden. My plot is growing tomatoes again this year, but no volunteer pumpkins, thank heavens. Though I would be hard pressed to learn how to be a full-scale farmer, being able to grow a little of my own food nourishes me both physically and emotionally.
I’m flummoxed that it’s nearly time for school to start again. Please take good care as the season winds down. Lots of virtual hugs!
Love, Jin
