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**I should start with a disclaimer.  I know that Grandma’s office was on Lincoln Ave. in Bellevue.  I browsed Google Earth and the pictures I’ve included look somewhat like the places I remembered.  Although my grandmother’s house looks the same that it did 20 years ago, downtown has changed some.  I do remember seeing a red white and blue barbershop  thing close to her office.  I also faintly remember walking by a car dealership that was close to her house which I saw a few blocks down on Google Earth and I recognized a big stone bank that used to be Mellon Bank close by**

Grandma owned her own real estate office (Bird Reality) in downtown Bellevue.  Her office was close enough to her home that we walked there regularly when we were visiting.  I remember that her business motto was “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”  She had a little office with brown paneling on the walls.  In the back room she had a kitchen with a fridge. I imagine a picture of an owl cross-stitch on the wall, but it may be misplaced in my memory. I think maybe she used an owl in her company logo or something because I think of brown and orange owls when I think of her office. Grandma must have been excellent at managing money because somehow she saved up enough to give us a generous college fund. She started putting money away for our college fund when we were born, or shortly thereafter, but wasn’t able to establish one for each of my siblings before she died (when I was about 11). I remember my mom telling me once that she was a little frustrated that they had so many kids because she couldn’t keep up.

As kids we would sometimes go to the office with her.  I imagine her sitting at her desk with one of those old black corded phones.  Across the street from her office were a variety of little stores that we loved to go explore.  One store was like a little convenience store with candy machines. Another one sold small toys. There was one store where they sold paper fans for 25 cents each. They were the kind that folded into a black metal case with a hinged latch to keep them closed. They had pictures of flowers on the paper fan part. I remember collecting a whole set by buying one each time I went. When I was little, Grandma told me the street was magic and all I had to do was step one foot into the street and all the  cars would stop so that I could cross. I was mystified by this until I was older and I noticed a sign that said something about cars being required to stop for pedestrians. I remember cautiously putting one foot into the street and watching as all the cars stopped.

I remember studying the big houses as I walked to town. At least one had a big wrought iron fence and another had high bushes so that you couldn’t see the whole house. I loved that I could just walk to a store. Growing up in the country meant that mom’s weekly trip to town was always an event that no-one wanted to miss, but at grandma’s house we could walk everyday if we wanted. We discovered a playground in walking distance. I remember playing there and meeting a few other kids there. We never had kids to play with at Pittsburgh Grandma’s house because we had no cousins and we didn’t know where any kids lived.

My dad used to take us to a place by some railroad tracks where we would look for fossils. I’m no geologist, so I don’t know what kind of rocks they were, but there was an abundance of flat gray rocks that you could use a chisel to chip away layers of. The rocks crumbled easily and it never took long to find an imprint of a leaf or fern. One time I found an imprint of a stick. It was the most exciting thing I ever found. I remember taking it home to show off. My dad would tell us stories of his childhood as we walked, like the time he founded a 4-H club or that he used to keep the money grandma gave him to ride the bus to school and walk instead.