📿 Small acts done with great love

Thinking about Doris as I pull on my gardening gloves.

Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

It’s Spring and I’m gardening which means that I’ve been thinking about Doris, and flowers, and how redemptive beauty can be - especially when we’re devoted to caring for it. 

For the first decade of my life in New York City, I lived down the hall from her, Doris Tantillo. She was my landlady turned surrogate Italian grandmother. I can picture her in her signature Coke bottle glasses and sleeveless house dresses that snapped down the front. In the summer she wore a housedress over carpenter pants and in the fall, a housedress over sweaters. It was a uniform of sorts that made her look like she was always on duty. And she was, sort of, always on duty. Always caring for her building. 

Doris had purchased her three story townhouse on seamstress wages during the height of World War II. Her father was terminally ill and their apartment in Midtown had been gutted by a fire, so she and her mother scraped together their savings and purchased the building together. Her parents were Italian immigrants, and the townhouse was in an ethnically Greek and Italian neighborhood. I imagine this brought them the comfort of familiarity or a sense of implicit belonging. Though by the time that I arrived, the neighborhood had already started to gentrify. Doris would lament that she was now forced to buy “dead chicken” from the butcher on the corner. This was chicken that was already sanitized, sliced, and refrigerated in plastic. When she moved to the neighborhood, you would choose live chickens out of a pen in the back.

First the dead chicken at the corner butcher. Now the craft cocktail lounges, gluten free pizza shops, and Midwestern kids who looked like me. Still, there was Doris in her house dresses, sweeping the stoop clean of debris every morning.