We did not share steps either, which means we lived in one of the upscale houses on the street!!Love, CLB
There is always room for snobbery. I think the residents of #13 could claim it, just by virtue of their single steps, but they had #13 and that, plus their placement among the neighbors pretty much cancelled it out. Thanks to my dearest old friend, I am reminded that the truly upscale folks in the neighborhood between the cemetery and the woods were those inhabiting the "end house". Any row of houses eventually ends and that last one is always slightly different than the others. It doesn't share steps and there is access from the front of the house to the back of the house. There is, however small, a yard that runs along the side of the house where normally another house would be. There are interior windows where the other houses have large expanses of wall, resulting in a brighter home. The owners of end houses were always well aware of their higher social status and often enjoyed rubbing the others nose in it by prohibiting any access to their yards. That's where the greased metal pole came in, the brambly thorn bushes, high walls with stones placed strategically so that it was impossible to rest one's behind on them. Fences. End people, quite frankly, were often anti-social. They certainly were not row-house people and despite their attitudes we would remind them that they were not single house people either. They were, just people who did not have to walk their lawnmowers around the block just to trim the front lawn.
