by Cesse Ip

This is the story of how I fell in love with Petworth (and why I decided to start writing for Petworth News).

Before my husband and I bought our house in Petworth, we lived in a 400 square foot, four-story walk-up for three years. I was infatuated immediately – I loved our house, our neighbors were cool, and I especially enjoyed going grocery shopping without having to walk two blocks from the car and up four flights of stairs. Three of my best friends ended up buying houses in the two years following our arrival in Petworth, which made me ecstatic.

While I dislike it when people say that their lives didn’t begin until their children were born, my true love of Petworth didn’t start to blossom until my oldest son was born in the fall of 2016. After his birth, I joined the Petworth Parents group and attended some of the Petworth New Parents outings. Two of the women I met were also in my same PACE group, and we became close. It was so great to have women who had the same age child, were also on maternity leave, and were in walking distance. We went on walks with the babies, coffee dates at Qualia, we even did baby yoga at Lighthouse Yoga together.

Even after we slowly started to go back to work, we still hosted play dates, swim meet ups at Takoma, and met up for Halloween at Petworth Playground, and met up at Petworth Jazz. I am still in regular contact with these women through email and a prolific WhatsApp group.

When my oldest was one and a half, my work moved me and my family to Korea. A month-ish before, this same group of women organized a toddler food exchange. Everyone brought 12 servings of a toddler-approved food, froze it, and brought it to share. While this wasn’t planned around my departure, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I was stressed with all the moving details, and fixing a nutritious meal for my toddler was just one less thing that I had to worry about.

It was then that I knew I had truly found something unique and irreplaceable. While I was excited about the adventure of moving abroad, I knew that I would deeply miss these women, their babies, and the community that I had made in Petworth.

My time in Korea came to an abrupt halt in the beginning of March 2019 when I was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer while nursing my second son. We quickly moved back to DC, and in with my in-laws in the Maryland suburbs so I could receive treatment in a country where I spoke the language. One of my friends that I had met in Petworth during my maternity leave happened to be moving back home to Chicago as we were moving back, and she offered us her house to move into so I could be closer to the hospital, closer to my eldest’s former daycare that we hoped to reenroll him in, and back to the familiarity of Petworth.

While back on maternity/cancer leave with my youngest son, I joined the Petworth Repeat Parents group. These women had older kids similar in age to my oldest, and babies the same age as my youngest. Like the first time, we were going through similar struggles, wanted to talk about similar things, and all lived in the neighborhood. We met up at Hamilton Playground, music classes at ANXO, and had Monday brunches at Homestead. Again, I had found another community in Petworth.

This community came through for me in generous and such thoughtful ways while I was undergoing chemo and recovering from surgery in 2019. Families from these two groups hosted my oldest on playdates, so I could focus on resting on the weekend. One friend picked up and dropped him off at school the day after my surgery. Another came and organized my closet after I had just tetris’d everything I could into it after a haphazard move back. People bought me gift cards to Timber Pizza, brought me home made meals, dropped off surprise Trader Joe’s snacks.

The people in Petworth are what made me fall in love with it. The friendships that I have formed through this neighborhood will be lifelong, and have shined light on really horrible moments. I feel like COVID-19 has taken away all the great parts of city living, and left the horrible parts, But my WhatsApp group chats with the groups of friends rooted in Petworth have been refreshing, brutally honest, and given me more belly laughs than I think I had in me during this depressing year. These friendships have kept up the spirit of community while the physical sense is gone.

That is my long-winded reason for wanting to contribute to Petworth News. To be more active in the community that has given me so much. To write stories about the amazing people that I know are out there. To answer questions, provide information, and maybe even humor at the hyperlocal level. I’m looking forward to getting to know more of you as I become more active at Petworth News.

Please feel free to email me! What do you want to know about? Any story ideas?

Cesse IP moved to DC in 2008, and in 2014 she and her husband decided to make Petworth their home. Petworth has been where she has found her best friends, her kids’ friends, and her “people.” When she’s not working for the Department of Defense or chasing around her two small sons, she enjoys cooking, eating (especially when someone else is doing the cooking), reading, and playing Settlers of Catan. A true nerd with two degrees in mathematics, writing came late to her but she is looking forward to answering your questions about our community!