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All Those Windowed Rooms

Cathy Allman

I’m from a city with many bridges. Four hundred sixty-six.
Three more than Venice, Italy.
Arch bridges, beam bridges, suspension bridges,
life brimmed on all sides of the three rivers.

The hospital I was born in was on the Allegheny.
My father was born along that river too,
but in a house without plumbing or electricity.
His life began in the year of the Great Depression.

When I was a teenager, my middle-aged father and I
parked on the North Side and walked across
the bridge into Pittsburgh. “These are the good people,”
he told me. “People who work hard.”

He wore Brooks Brothers suits, worked
in a glass castle—the PPG building.
I interned at a bank between semesters in college.
I wasn’t all the way grown-up, but I dressed as if I was.

I’m grown-up now. I’m a grandmother.
I live in a house on a hill with a river
view. My wordless restlessness
matches the cycle of the seasons.

There is light in my house. When the windows
open, in the breeze I smell my childhood.
Cut grass. Cherry trees, petals that blanketed
the ground with all they’d let go of.

I marvel at the tide. One minute it looks
like we could walk across the river to town;
then later the same day, the other side is far
away, can only be reached by boat or bridge.

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