November 22, 2025

I didn’t appreciate the depth of her defiance until I was in my mid-50s, when I did something that I had never done: I traveled to her childhood home in Baltimore. On an overcast summer morning, I drove to Mill Hill, my mother’s childhood community. She lived on Wilkins Avenue, on a quintessential Baltimore block of gleaming marble steps, neat row houses and a still-stately St. Benedict…