the corner where they lived.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving we drove in toward Pittsburgh from Butler--Mark's home town.  We got as far as the city outskirts to a little place called Mount Lebanon.  Pittsburgh is nestled down in a valley where three rivers meet, the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers.  The hills that rise up, including the famed Mount Washington, surround the city as the porcelain walls of a bathtub. They are dotted with simple homes and nondescript structures--old mills and sheds of sorts.  Pittsburgh's history lies in the steel industry and the city people are hard working.  It is an aged and solemn city. 

The street winds around up Mount Lebanon and passes houses that grow by the block.  The oldest houses, found up on top of the hill, are structurally unique, built with mortar and stone and sharp angled roofs.  The yards are small--every house seems like a well postured gentry standing in his square foot guard post.

As we wound through the neighborhoods, I realized we would pass Mark's folks' first house.  They had met working at the city hospital--a nurse and a young doctor--and fallen in love in the courtly city.  Doc had grown up on Mount Lebanon and when he and Joyce were married, they decided to start back at his beginning.  We drove around corners and sucked in our breath as the Honda squeezed between a row of parked cars and a passing Lexus.  The houses were framed with red and white Christmas lights and in the early dark we passed heedless window people cooking dinner and picking toys up off of the ground. 

Doc pulled up in front of a house on a steep hill.  "This is it," he said, crouching down to look up out of the passenger window. "This is the house I grew up in."  We all looked and I was smiling, and nobody had anything to say.   We drove on down the block and made a few turns, pulling up again in front of another house, smaller, with the front door open and the light shining out onto the lawn.  

Joyce put her hand on Doc's shoulder and said,"there's our first house." Turning to her husband she said,"don't you just miss Mount Lebanon?" 

He chuckled and as he pulled away he glanced back out of the window and exclaimed, "those are my steps!"

"Oh yeah!  Mark, your father built those steps down from the porch to the back.  There weren't steps when we moved in."  She looked back at him and said, "That's your carpentry-- holds up a long time."  She sighed and watched out the window as we drove around down the hill.  

We ate dinner in a quaint restaurant in the neighborhood around the corner from where Joyce used to walk the girls when they were babies and she would wait for Doc to get home from work. "One time," she explained, "I had Lisa in the stroller and I tipped it and she fell right into the gutter.  And then Stef started screaming, 'Mommy! The baby!'  I had to tell her to hush because, of course, all of the rich Mount Lebanon mothers are walking through town and here I am, this young mother, throwing my child in a gutter."  She shook her head and laughed at the memory.  It was sweet to watch her delight in memories that poured forth so heedlessly.

Outside it was windy and cold, but inside it was cozy.  The restaurant had once been someone's home; our reserved table was in an upstairs bedroom of sorts, only the walls had been punched out.  We drank wine and laughed about stories that took place long before Mark and I could be found anywhere but God's ledger.  How thankful I was to put a hand on a place which, to me, was merely a place but to them was the backdrop of an era.