When the US Navy reassigned Tricia Siladi and her family to the District in August 2020, she was anxious and afraid.
She, her husband and her young daughter were moving from Florida during the summer of the pandemic, staying in hotels en route. She didn’t know what effect staying in all these strange places would have on her family’s health. She didn’t know what kind of strange place they were moving to as they headed to the home rented for them on Capitol Hill. She worried that their arrival during the pandemic would mean they would be isolated and lonely. As she headed to the new house, she already wanted to go home.
Then, she said, she saw the signs.
Friends, your lawn signs, the ones we got during the pandemic that say, “love is love,” and “hate isn’t welcome here”? They worked.
“All the signage around just immediately made me feel like, wow, we’re in a really positive space where people are really just human —and caring about other people,” said Siladi.
And the neighbors proved that the signs pointed to the truth that lives within our quaint brick rowhouses. The family next door was the first people the Siladis saw on the Hill. They were another family with a child the same age who welcomed them, Siladi said, with open arms —at first figuratively, but later, literally.
Everywhere, she could see signs that this was a community that prevailed despite challenges: children playing on the street; clutches of friends scattered in Lincoln Park.
“It made me feel like, wow, this is really a community where people know each other and care about each other,” she said.
“She Made Friends, and So Did I”
As time went on, the Siladi’s community got bigger. It was a bonus in more than one way when Tricia and her husband found out about the District’s free public preschool program. They immediately submitted an application for their two-year-old in the MySchoolDC lottery for the following year. They won the lottery, she said, gaining a seat at Maury Elementary. “That was really life changing,” Siladi said, noting that her husband, a military man, works long hours.
Preschool transformed their lives, Siladi said. It gave them more than convenience. “It changed a lot because then that became a community for us,” she said.
Their daughter, isolated for most of her first few years due to the pandemic, was very eager to make friends. “So she got a whole new set of little buddies —and so did I.”
Room parents organized events where students attended with their entire families, not only at the school but in local parks, allowing families to build relationships.
Just after their eldest entered preschool, they had their second child, now a two-year-old. The community came to their front door to offer congratulations, love and support.
“Our friends and neighbors brought us food and flowers and things like that,” she said. “It was just very thoughtful, generous and really sweet. It made us feel taken care of.”
Golden Opportunity
The children have a lot of experiences on the Hill and in the District as well. Their eldest is a Girl Scout, and Siladi says that has opened up all sorts of opportunity. She’s learned about elections and democracy from the DC Board of Elections in the basement of St. Peter Church. She’s slept over at museums, and bowled at the White House Executive Mansion.
“It’s an opportunity to learn as part of a group,” Siladi said, “and I like having this cohesive group of young girls together.”
The kids also play softball with Capitol Hill Little League, teaching them to build skills, see her progress and be part of a team.
And it’s all so easy to get to, Siladi adds. The neighborhood and the city are so walkable, they arrived with two cars but donated the other to NPR shortly after arriving. “You don’t really need to have a car to live here,” Siladi said.
So Many Choices
That means Siladi isn’t always the one to program their weekends and days off. The kids know what they want to do and how they want to get there.
The kids love to ride the bus and the metro and go to museums. They want to go to Planet Word, to the Natural History Museum, or the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library where they love to visit the café and slide down the big slide. Their daughter is into spies and loves to go to the Spy Museum.
“Any interest they have, we can really enrich them,” Said Siladi.
Their son is into Daniel Tiger, so when the show was featured at the Children’s Museum, they got on their bikes and went. They’ll ride down to Nationals Stadium for a baseball game.
The kids know all the places, she said. “There’s just so many choices of things to do, and it’s so easy to get to them, and it’s like an adventure every time for them. And then they get to learn something new.”
Community
There are many cultural sites, but the community itself provides just as much opportunity. Neighbors and their kids will pop over into one another’s house. “I just think that’s such a cool experience for kids to have,” Siladi said. “You can’t replicate this area anywhere else.”
Opportunity knocks, and sometimes it just pops up in your path. One day, the family was on a walk down C Street SE when they passed DC Fire & EMS Engine Company 10 (1520 C St. SE). The fire station was open for a community event the Siladis hadn’t even known about. Their two year old climbed into the fire truck and was given a fire hat. “He was so happy,” his mother said.
Frequently, the whole family will go scootering or riding bikes, “and then we kind of run into something like that, where we’re like, Oh, wow.” Siladi said.
Once while out together they heard music in the distance. They keep moving and found a string quartet playing on someone’s lawn.“And we just happened upon it. That was a cool Capitol Hill moment,” she said.
One of her favorite moments happened during the winter holidays. The family was out with friends in Lincoln Park when the MPD Santa Express, an official police vehicle that pulls a lit up trailer complete with reindeer props and a Santa sleigh headed into the park.
“It was just really heartwarming to see, like, all these kids running, and they had Christmas music playing, and all the kids got to sit on Santa’s lap, like in this thing that they made, like, on the back of their truck at night. It was just really magical,” she said.
In the summer, there are block parties everywhere on the Hill. Neighbors converge on the street with bouncy houses, inviting friends to join in. One party they attended in Hill East had a foam machine for the kids.
“The whole street was covered in bubbles and all the kids were playing in them, getting soaking wet. We could barely see our son,” she said. He was very happily giggling at the center of a cloud of bubbles, she said.
The adults stood together, watching. They were also giggling.
Coming Home
Now, Siladi looks back on her first day in Capitol Hill as though watching a different person. She wants her children to have the gift of growing up on the Hill.
As their second child is eligible for preschool, she said, “we want him to have all of the experiences his sister had. A house here can assure us of that.”
From wanting to go home, the Siladis now want to make the Hill their permanent home. She knows that the military could relocate them, but this is where they want to be —the place they call home.
They came in a time of uncertainty, and found stability. “We want a community that’s really home, that we can always come back to,” she said.
In another time of anxiety, they have found security. They’ve found home, here on the Hill.
This story originally appeared in the Capital Commnunity News Fagon Capitol Hill Community Guide, distributed to doorsteps in the 20002 and 20003 zip codes in May and June.
