Melody Warnick's Blog, page 3

Issue 16: When Bad Things Happen to Good Towns

If you live in Blacksburg, Virginia, you’re apparently obligated to hate Charlottesville, at least a little. Every team has its cross-town rival, and the University of Virginia is Virginia Tech’s, thus—and correct me if I’m wrong, because I know zero about sports—we are natural enemies. Giving a talk in Charlottesville a few months ago for the Virginia Festival of the Book, I nervously cracked a joke about being from Blacksburg, and someone said, “We’ll forgive you.”

In truth, we’re a bit je...

Issue 15: Buy the lemonade.

My kids have spent approximately 1 million hours staring at screens this summer, and this morning my horror at my own lazy parenting came to a head. “NO SCREENS!” I intoned. I helped my distraught 10-year-old recover from the shock by brainstorming what she could do instead. Number 1 on her list was “Have a lemonade stand,” an activity I normally discourage because it requires arduous tasks like hauling the folding table from the basement. But desperate times and all. With her friend Grace,...

Issue 14: Summer Beach Reads

Reading is delightful year round, but the phrase “summer beach read” always fills me with a giddy anticipatory pleasure. I’m not sure why. During a two-week New England vacation that landed me on more beaches than I’ve seen in five years, I read approximately 1/3 of one book and 1/2 of another. That’s it. And yet I cling to the idea that summer will bring me long, uninterrupted stretches for reading, and that I’m entitled during summer to read things that are as indulgent and lazy as the sea...

Issue 13: It Was Like an Episode of Fixer-Upper

This is how my town works. A couple issues back, in this very newsletter, I said the following:

My husband complained about a pothole the other day and I thought,
“We really need this app.”

And within, like, 5 minutes of pressing send on that puppy, Blacksburg’s community relations manager, Heather Browning, emails me. “Hey Melody, we have just what you need. It’s called At Your Request.”

Whoa. Mic drop.

Right away I filled out the online form to describe where the pothole was. I included my...

Issue 12: You Need a Friend

A few weeks ago, at the Virginia Festival of the Book, I did a placemaking activity where I had passersby fill out cards that said, “I live in ______________ and this is why I love it.” People dashed off answers like:

“Diversity & inclusiveness! We welcome everyone!”—Decatur, Georgia
“Because the people are welcoming and the food is delicious.”—Houston, Texas
“It is full of interesting people who’ve built a close-knit, lively, supportive community that feels small-town.”—Montclair, Virginia
...

Issue 11: Steal This Strategy

A woman I met told me about moving her family and her mother from California to South Carolina a few months ago, buying and selling “four properties in three cities in two states” in a whirlwind process that left her drained and exhausted. You wouldn’t blame her for holing up in her (river-view) study and practicing yoga breathing for 11 months. Instead, she’s created this fantastic strategy for developing place attachments.

She asks everyone she meets one important question. She says, “What...

Issue 10: The Third Way to Fall in Love with Your Town

There’s a study I talk up all the time that found that you’re most likely to be place attached if your city does three things well: social offerings, aesthetics, and openness. People tend to understand the first two. It’s the third one, openness, that causes problems. Even after I explain that openness means your city welcomes all kinds of residents, sometimes people are like, “Huh?”

So here’s a concrete example. For a while now I’ve been volunteering with the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership,...

Issue 9: Welcome to Minnesota, Here’s Your Hat

Moving to a new city is like walking into a party where you don’t know anyone. You’re secretly hoping everyone’s going to fight each other for dibs on being your new best friend, and when that doesn’t happen (because does that ever happen?) you end up hovering near the metaphorical hors d’oeuvres table, wishing someone would please acknowledge your existence.

You’re not alone. Pretty much everyone experiences that I AM UTTERLY ALONE moment when they move to a new city. Then you make friends,...

Issue 8: It’s Hard to Love Your City When It’s Cold Out

On Wednesday it was 62 degrees here in Blacksburg, and it felt like the earth had been reborn, and all of us right along with it. A teacher at my daughter’s school said, “This weather is tricking me into being happy.” After the bell rang, families lingered. Kids swarmed the monkey bars while their parents peeled off the layers of coats and sat in the sun on the blacktop. I took an extra-long walk and lifted my face to the sun, so grateful.

I don’t need to tell you that today it’s 31 degrees...

Issue 7: The Good Kind of Resolution

People tend to feel passionately about New Year’s resolutions one way or the other. I’m quite in favor of them myself, spending the days around January 1 plotting how this year I’m actually going to do my resolutions, not just think about them. I bought this habit calendar from Kickstarter because I’d read that Jerry Seinfeld created an ironclad daily writing habit by marking an X on a calendar every day he wrote. As the string of X’s grew, keeping the streak became the incentive. Now I’m fe...