Little Georgia and the Apples

I’m Aunt Georgia, I’m eighty-one years old now, and I’m going to tell you a story from when I was a little girl.

It was a hot miserable day in late August in the year 1931, and all eight of us Johnson children, from my sister Rowena, a teenager with wide hoop earrings, to my youngest brothers, Jack and Buddy, were sitting on the lawn near the catalpa trees in Kenilworth.

Today Kenilworth is still a friendly neighborhood here in Washington, DC, out where the Anacostia River shakes itself and turns around and flows strong toward the Potomac River. When I was a little girl there, we had the lily ponds with no fence around them, and my father’s sweet high corn, and storytelling afternoons under the catalpa trees. Today they call our lily ponds the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, and the National Park Service set up a gate there on Anacostia Avenue, but there was a time when I could lie on the grass near the front of our house and roll down the hill laughing and catch myself just before I splashed into one of the ponds. I used to roam around there with my dog, Prince, walking between the catalpa trees and the bamboo and the cherry trees.

Back in 1931, my Kenilworth neighborhood was so countrified — can you believe it? — we had a real farm right inside the city of Washington. Today the old property is bottled in with new houses, although a brown stream still runs through in the back. But let me tell you, we used to have the best corn and tomatoes and string beans. And as for my father’s lima beans in butter, with some fresh corn mixed in to make succotash! Umm, umm, umm, it was so good, a plate of it could bring sweet tears to your eyes. Let me tell you, my old Kenilworth home still remembers some good eatings out there on the edge of the city.

But about the eight of us sisters and brothers, did I say we are sitting? We aren’t really sitting, we are panting and suffering. I mean, think of a gaggle of children sitting on a lawn in high summer, the heat so thick that the air is tingling and shimmering with it. I feel like even my eyelids are dripping with the heat. We are all damp with humidity and wish someone could just wring us out. And we are sitting on an itchy scratchy cloth with itchy scratchy grass poking through. Ouch! That’s what it is like, a miserable gaggle of children on a miserable hot day.

Do you know what a gaggle is? A gaggle is for geese. You’re supposed to say a gaggle of geese when there are a bunch of geese running all over the road like they do up by Howard University and the reservoir. Haven’t you seen the sign on Fourth Street telling you that geese are crossing? 

If you haven’t seen them walking up out of the water and trying to go to college at Howard, then you just need to go on up there and look at them. If you do go, be sure you stand on the Washington Hospital Center side where it’s safe, right in front of Children’s Hospital. If you look you’ll see a gaggle of Canadian geese swimming around and eating Howard University grass and stopping all the traffic on Michigan Avenue when folks are trying to get downtown on the weekend.